My hobby horse is blaming the voting/ranking systems, but I know that's only part of it. The voting system here, as in other social media sites, is reductive in

My hobby horse is blaming the voting/ranking systems, but I know that's only part of it. The voting system here, as in other social media sites, is reductive in character. There are a whole universe of ways to rank/rate comments, and could be a wide vector, but we get up/no-op/down as our only options. Social media drives out nuance and subtlety by design. Blogs forced a long form reply and consideration, which allowed for a much richer, but much slower and less likely to get comments, channel for discussion. I think most of us here have a rich set of opinions, and quite a bit to offer to a discussion, but when you're possibly getting downvoted for just uttering the wrong opinion, it causes a lot of self-censorship.