What we're missing is a serious change in mentality. Internet Points/Karma and a different UI won't change that. We already have all the technology for such discussions, but no one is interested. The closest thing to serious public political discussions is happening in the House and Senate floor debates, or whatever is equivalent in your country, and nobody watches that.

Ironically if you watch UK Prime Minister's Questions it consists primarily of point-scoring and jeering, with occasional excursions into triviality.

On occasion in Parliament you will find people delivering impassioned, carefully researched speeches .. to an empty room.

The prerequisite for discussion has to be willingness to listen and finding a commonality of view, both of which are in very short supply these days.

Much of that is due to incentives and not an inescapable aspect of public fora. Two notable examples that stand out in my mind of "people I probably disagree with about some things but trust highly" are HN's very own gwern, for exhaustive research, and Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex. Somehow they have hacked, avoided, or self-disciplined their way into good-faith engagement without giving up ground to do so.

Integrated fact-checking would go a long way in political debates; gwern provides his own and S. Alexander, while less exhaustive, is relentless in analyzing his own biases and hewing to rhetorical charity. They would be less remarkable in a world where political debates had integrated fact-checking, as politicians would have to adapt.

Speeches to an empty room are still being read into the record (Hansard).

This is exactly right, and isn't a new problem either - it's literally always been the case.

I would almost argue that public debate doesn't really matter - it's always just a small handful of activists who get things changed (for better or worse).

I don't see Reddit as this platform at all since if it takes some more turns away from entertaining their visitors to something else, it won't be Reddit anymore. So why do that to Reddit at all?

When I go to reddit, I want entertainment. To do this I follow rule 5 of the Pentabarf: "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads.". This is how the page works out for me. From this point of view all that stress that happened recently seems pretty ridiculous to me. It seemed like they decided to tar the garden. Because after that you can be sure what will be in the area. Parked cars. If you now put a shopping mall next to it, it will still work, people will go there and hang out because there is not much else to do. But I don't see that as a creative pool anymore and it will bore me at some point. I'm pretty sure about it.

On the other hand there is this opportunity that grew with the Pao disaster. As far as I could see there is not one portal that came up with an real alternative that would catch "the spirit". Instead we got the hate-reddit and some hipster-reddits all in protection-mode just like Reddit today. Everyone is managing this their way (by circlejerking, minimum vote count which leads to more circlejerking or invite only).

This is no development of a culture that would participate in your "forum of the world". This is just a poor recap of real life politics. Their sides, dogmas and means to protect their world view. Killing everything that might threaten it on a meta-level.

I'm not really sure the Post-Snowden Internet we have today is even the right medium. I don't want my political views profiled and sold to the highest bitter. I don't want to give power to bot networks, circle jerks, SJWs, etc. We are still unable to cope with this groups within a entertainment network, how should we get them to interact on really relevant topics without just banning them from participation? Which seems to be the best way to go right now...

You use the word "serious" a lot. But ultimately it's still talk. Seriousness would imply being organised, in the activist sense. Which generally ends up excluding superficiality in favour of commitment.

"Serious" is also in direct conflict with "light-hearted, superficial". And the dark heart as well; you can't be serious when random people with racist or misogynist usernames can drop in.

  > Make karma worth something

Pay content creators? Controversial. Note that making it worth something would require that it be scarce and not easily gameable.

I didn't mean "worth something" to imply a financial value. I meant it more as a gatekeeping mechanism to the serious discussions. Which is why there would need to be split between viral/entertainment karma and "serious" karma. And that would also be the fix for your concerns of "just talk" or harmful personalities dropping in.

I'm not terribly concerned with whether people catch this vision or not - the bigger point is that reddit needs their own vision.

Karma's not exactly a reliable measure of anything you'll want to base policy on. It's easy enough to game, and a large portion of it is just a measure of how present and non-contrarian you are. It isn't generally allocated to anyone for saying what needs to be said, but the same trivialities we don't like in normal politics. This is especially true in bigger, more diverse communities.

If I were the product manager, I'd simply reply to that issue with, "So we'll fix it."

Dismissing out new ideas because of problems with the current paradigm is non-productive. Identifying issues, and proposing solutions to those issue is how to make progress.

You can say "we'll fix it" to everything. That doesn't cause it to be fixed, though. I'm not dismissing the idea, I'm asking for a possible solution.

One possible solution is multi-tiered karma. The bottom tier would be the status quo, but the higher tiers require actual insights and productive discussion, and can only be granted by those who have already proven themselves to have the capability to carry out that level of dialogue. There may even be moderation for karma, to give rationale for up/down, with moderators verifying new users at each tier. At the end of it all, the amount of karma isn;t going to be very meaningful, but the tier you are allowed to participate in would give credibility to a small set of discussions, making them meaningful at a societal level.

But I want to be clear that I'm not pitching this idea in any way. This whole idea that I am discussing was literally ripped straight from a sci-fi novel. What I really want is to encourage people to come up with their own ideas, and not just look for minor improvements to reddit's existing site.

I want reddit's leadership to live up to the concept of being revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Reddit is what Quora should have been. I'm always amazed at the quality of discussion on some niche sub-reddits. It's come to a point where I append "reddit" before my searches whenever I'm looking for any recommendations.

Not to mention the huge repository of stories on AskReddit.

At the same time, most smaller subreddits are also terribly parochial and hostile to new members. The culture in some subreddits is also very toxic.

Reddit would be an incredible platform if you could remove its cynicism and circlejerking