With regards to politics, wasn't that found to be a Russian active measures tactic where they'd get low quality or inaccurate comments up voted to the top, down vote actual informative comments, and flood their up voted comments with low quality replies and threads to push the informative stuff so low that users likely will give up scrolling before they see it?

No need for foreign operatives, we do it ourselves.

We treat thumbs up/down as agree/disagree, whether we're supposed to or not.

They just enhance it, the division and polarisation already exist, what Russia has learned is that if they press those buttons hard enough they make our democracies ungovernable.

They aren't causing it, just furthering our issues for their own goals, and unfortunately it's working pretty well.

Keep in mind that people don't talk about that which they believe they completely understand. When someone reaches a satisfiable conclusion in understanding, they lose interest in the subject and move on to something else.

The political discourse around polarizing topics isn't disastrous. It takes place exactly because people realize that they are complex issues not fully understood, and are talking about it in hopes that more information will come to light to help them reach a greater understanding. This is why the more complex the issue, the more it will keep coming up over and over.

This is one of the most optimistic but realistic perspectives I’ve heard about online discussions in a long time. Thank you.

Let me offer a dark one:

human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this

All was achieved when it was widely not so, and by people not affected by this.

Thank you. This is a refreshing take on much of human interaction.

As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.

This is a good point and I'm certainly subject to this.

I read the most about topics that have no clear objective truth. Mostly around Sociology, Psychology and Politics.

Engineering principles I have a deep knowledge of do not attract my attention other than to clear up someone's misconceptions.