&gt;<i>But we&#x27;ve seen the result of that. It&#x27;s not some sort of blindingly beautiful laboratory of democracy, it&#x27;s a whole bunch of barely-literate people chanting slogans at each other between the trolls.</i><p>So? Who has the right to tell those people they shouldn&#x27;t be discussing?<p>And with what moral authority? (apart from the sheer power of &quot;I&#x27;m the owner of this site, and I will close the forum down&quot;).<p>&gt;<i>There&#x27;s a fundamental structural problem here. Imagine a full stadium of people all trying to talk to each other about the same thing, on the same topic, through the same pipe. What do you expect to happen? No real-world conversations work like that.</i><p>Few real-world stuff works like tech-stuff works. That&#x27;s kind of the point. You don&#x27;t have to engage with everybody in the same pipe anyway -- you can just focus on the comments you find interesting.<p>Besides, I&#x27;ve had wonderful conversations on Slashdot, and Reddit and other places, even places like 9gag.<p>As for the crap, well I can ignore trolls and bypass opinions I consider uninformed or bad. I can also (if I&#x27;m bored and want to pass the time) engage with them.<p>And that&#x27;s important too. Not hiding unpopular opinions and people we consider &quot;uninformed&quot; under the carpet and pretending they don&#x27;t exist, because those are parts of life too. Dealing with these is still better than living in an echo chamber.