On Internet Discussions

One of the things I've been trying to do with this blog is foster discussion. Unfortunately, that hasn't really happened. I know for a fact that most of my readers haven't told me they read it, and the ones who do rarely leave comments.

I'm not unhappy that this hasn't been happening, because I wasn't optimistic about its chances chances in the first place. For one, this blog is fairly personal. While I'm transitioning from "this is what I'm doing" to "These are the ideas I'm trying to adopt", everything is still said in the context of 'me'. I'm drawing really heavily on my own ideas, actions, and interactions for this, and I think it makes it trickier to talk about it generally.

I'm starting to think that the Internet is very bad at fostering discussion, though. Something about the combination of personal distance, unlimited time to think, and the expectation to write completely coherent thoughts kinda kills it. But what I'm really looking for isn't just talking about one topic. I also want a discussion that spirals into tangents and eventually ends miles away from where it started. Like 95% of my best ideas happen in these discussions. Hell, I've already mentioned that 'Reason' and 'Elitism' came about from arguments. I'd probably be updating this blog a hundred times more often if I wasn't so agreeable.

When I think of 'online discussion', the image I get is a forum. Remember those? Built around specific interests. You get a few categories, somebody posts a topic, and everything throws on responses. Because active topics are thrown to the top people keep talking about it and new people keep joining in. Eventually everybody gets bored and moves on to other topics people posted, because every topic expects people talking about it.

Nowadays they've mostly been replaced by facebook, which is a lot worse at doing this. Statuses aren't really the best place for talking about things for a number of reasons (which probably are the same in blogs). Notes make things a bit easier, but I don't think anybody uses notes anymore. The old groups could-sorta-get-this-a-bit-kinda. The new groups not so much.

I'd try making a forum to see if it provides what I want, but the chances of getting enough people to consistently use it is... 0. Other possibilities include saying lots of inflammatory things on this blog (angry people write more) and posting terrible things to Facebook. I don't think I can do either without being a terrible person, though.

That's where my brain runs out of thinky-juice. How can we foster more discussion online in the context of our current networks? Primarily facebook, email, and blogs. It might just be a cultural problem, where we don't use these things to discuss because we never have. But I still think none of them are well suited for it. Maybe there's something fancy you could do with google docs? Some way to cope with the new groups? There's no easy solution I see.

Oh hey, it's almost like we should talk it over!