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The moderation here is very good, but I think cultural self-selection is a big factor too. Speaking broadly, it attracts technical, logical people who share values and standards around reasoned debate. I don't see that part scaling to society at large.

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Eternal September is a datum that, contrary to initial hopes, that part doesn't scale to society at large. Online has become much more like offline than vice versa.

And even if we aren’t more Vulcan then the norm, we like to think we are :)

Well, even if you think it's all self-delusion, the ceremony around it is real and that's an important difference.

That's a really interesting observation. Really the site/service could just make the ceremony of objectivity part of the entire style and UX, that might be enough. There's other things you could do too, like make every statement tagged with a source, and let community attempt to mark each source as primary/secondary, full/partial context, etc. Those statements could rise based on those tags instead of upvotes. It'd be wikipedia-for-news like. Has this been done?

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