"Discussions online should be as fluid as if face-to-face." IMHO, (or maybe "for my purposes") discussions online have been plenty fluid ever since the forum w

"Discussions online should be as fluid as if face-to-face." IMHO, (or maybe "for my purposes") discussions online have been plenty fluid ever since the forum was invented. Beyond that, the quality of discussion depends on the people in it. Also, (quality) discussion is content, and the big feature of real-life conversation is that there are either no middlemen, or middlemen who get dumped in a snap when they make shenanigans. That is a minimum requirement for anything worthwhile on the web, too, where resources are even easier to come by. If there was a single site where all discussion took place, that in itself would be reason to boycott it. My advice would be to make (or improve) apps and protocols, not websites.