I'd say reasonable discussion doesn't happen between strangers.

My experience is that reasonable discussion is a higher percentage of internet discussion than it is of in person discussion. But maybe I hang out in different places to you on the internet, or perhaps the people I spend time with in real life are insufficiently interested in 'reasonable discussion'.

Maybe not on Reddit, which has an average age and IQ lower than here (in my very strong opinion).

But on the Internet, which is really to say in written form, there's more room for attention span and dissection of arguments. In person, in conversation, you have attention span issues, you have failure to break down definitions and thus people arguing sideways against one another, etc.

It's harder to cheat in the written word.

Even hacker news has a rediculously low signal to noise compared with, say, well moderated community debate or other in person discussion.

Actually, that's a reasonable statement.

Uh oh. This reasoning is unreasonably self-contradictory.