In my experience on reddit every interaction starts from 0 with minimal if any shared knowledge. You speak of people debating communism vs socialism vs pro-mar

In my experience on reddit every interaction starts from 0 with minimal if any shared knowledge. You speak of people debating communism vs socialism vs pro-market democrats, etc. etc. are these debates rich with historical and philosophical examples, building on a canon and discussing the ethics of how these ideas would actually play out? Or is it news articles, rhetorical games, semantics, and confirmation bias studies? The real significance of the difference there is the sincerity of the curiosity to find a solution. If someone has dedicated their time (reading serious, old, important books or doing REAL research) to understanding they have very few original thoughts and observing what came before them so they can say something productive. From what I have seen, that sincerity is stuck at a high school level pretty much site wide. For example, here on HN you can actually find people who have pretty deep knowledge in their fields and they don't need an online debate to show that. They just contribute and people often ask questions of them not as an infallible source or to test them but out of curiosity. The 'debates' that do happen here assume a much different character from reddit most of the time. There's a much healthier dynamic and its as realistic as I think it can get for what is possible on a text based social media platform.