There are conversations and then there are conversations. The dinner party conversations are ephemeral, often in a smaller groups than the whole of the attende

There are conversations and then there are conversations. The dinner party conversations are ephemeral, often in a smaller groups than the whole of the attendees. This is discourse in a small group where there is high bandwidth communication and nothing is recorded verbatim for posterity. Opinions can be malleable, folks may change their mind in the course of conversation. Online forums have much smaller bandwidth and much larger pool of participants. Nuance in expression is terribly limited to the ASCII character set. What ever you've written, whether a thoughtful paragraph or two, or just adding a short bit of flavouring to the discussion is now cast in stone for all time. My suspicion is that the size and durability of online forums is antithetical to nuanced discussion.