I actually came here to say this. This breaking-down process to turn complex arguments into a tree of simple statements that can be debated more objectively and

I actually came here to say this. This breaking-down process to turn complex arguments into a tree of simple statements that can be debated more objectively and with less controversy was the core of a similar platform that existed a few years ago, but which has since been discontinued, called Ideagraph. I collected all the remains of the website I could find some weeks ago here: http://imgur.com/a/bAmcV http://imgur.com/a/bAmcV. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a web archive version. I've been hoping the concept would surface again, and this Saysaw is quite close, but doesn't take the concept of distributed debate quite as far. EDIT: To be perfectly clear, since the blurbs in the link above make no mention of the working mechanism of the site: Ideagraph worked by allowing each statement to be voted up or down, or subdivided into its component ideas. This could happen multiple times, creating a deep tree structure, where only leaf nodes could be voted on; the score of the parent nodes would be automatically calculated from its children, all the way to the top (the high-level arguments). Also, any node could be linked to another part of the tree, which they describe as "Facts concluded in one debate by one group of people are reused in other debates." The whole thing was built on top of MediaWiki, to provide the wiki features of distributed editing, edit history, etc. (and also because the idea came from an attempt to improve Wikipedia discussions). But mediawiki obviously that wasn't the ideal platform to build such a system, and I believe it's one of the reasons the project was eventually discontinued.