To step over the essay and get to your larger point, I think there's a conceptual error in assuming agreement and disagreement are sufficiently symmetric that i

To step over the essay and get to your larger point, I think there's a conceptual error in assuming agreement and disagreement are sufficiently symmetric that it'd be reasonable to expect there to be a "solution" to the "problem" you're pointing out. I think the actual situation is that "agreement" as such is communicated by actions (either cooperation or mimicry) and "disagreement" as such is communicated by talking (eg: 'u r rong and eevil' responses). When you look at successful ad-hoc or loosely organized groups the common theme is outlets for mimicry or cooperation; eg: - 'birthers' don't post "i'm so ghey for your evidence and theories" love-notes to each other on the movement leaders' blogs; they indicate "agreement" by taking the message to new venues (cooperation), starting up (or taking over) local 'patriot' organizations (cooperation + mimicry), starting new blogs advancing the cause (mimicry) and trade strategies / information with each other (cooperation) - 'raelians' are actually a fairly ad-hoc and decentralized cult as cults go; there's lots of outlets for missionary work (mimicry + cooperation), 'spiritual practice' (mimicry + cooperation), and so on If the "host" doesn't have outlets for cooperation + mimicry that are both (a) visible to the host and (b) beneficial to the host then whatever agreement it generates will either be invisible or not beneficial or both; in the same way, if you convince people with your controversial blog post the "agreement" you'll see will come in the form of people linking to you (at its most visible) as 'great post by jerf' and more often it's just some invisible-to-you uptick in what % of people have similar takes on the issue you discussed. This makes a fundraiser for an institute to promote "rationalism" essentially a multiply-pathological case study with predictably poor results. EDIT: forgot one thing. "Communication" is a broad thing (most human action is communicative at some level or other). Different message types are best transmitted using different communications types, and I think this is probably unavoidable / not teachable. When you frame it as: "I communicate messages of type A on medium B and only get back responses of type C, but wish I also got messages of type D" it's a little limiting; the fact of the matter is that perhaps messages of type D are going out in other media, they're just not reaching your attention. I'm pessimistic in general as to how malleable the message-type and media-type pairing can be; my suspicion is that if you care about getting messages of type D you should first figure out how those messages are communicated -- eg medium E -- and then find a way to work with that constraint in mind. This probably means that the current internet communications media are: - productivity enhancers for existing high-passion groups - allowing new, low-intensity, low-passion groups to get made that otherwise wouldn't happen (cf: shirky's notion of the coasean floor) - ...not really going to enable the latter to graduate to the former on its own