&quot;How about totally free speech?&quot;<p>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.<p>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. The Internet can scale conversations up to real-world-absurd sizes, like the one we&#x27;re having here, but there&#x27;s still limits, and sites like CNN blast right through them. Not through any fault of their own, they&#x27;re just <i>too large</i> to host any sort of reasonable conversation.<p>To have reasonable conversations, you need something else, some sort of segmentation, by interests, by personalities, by who happened to show up at some obscure website, <i>something</i> to make it not just a few thousand people trying to shout into the same tin can.<p>This has little-to-nothing to do with &quot;free speech&quot; or ideological issues of any kind... it&#x27;s an engineering problem. I&#x27;d call it social engineering, but that has the entirely wrong connotation for this problem. But it&#x27;s still some sort of community engineering problem more than anything else. I&#x27;ve had the hobby of watching those sorts of things for about 15 years now and I&#x27;ve never seen even a hint of technology that a site as large as CNN could use to have some sort of robust, interesting debate. The incentives are all wrong, for all the participants, including CNN. Even the best tech I&#x27;ve seen breaks down at what is easily one order of magnitude below what CNN gets, if not two.