The structure of different fora profoundly affects the way conversations happen on them.
Twitter: Tweets in reverse chronological order, quote-tweeting biases your feed towards popularity with people you follow. Short text only, replies encouraged. Result: Twitter is about cliques. Your feed is filled with fights, bullying and cancellations within your clique. Twitter is also extremely socially influential.
Reddit: Posts in order of popularity, with time decay. Unpopular comments buried. Dictatorial mods remove anything they don't like. Results: Reddit is shithole consisting of single SJW worldview and memes. A few genuinely worthwhile subs, but they're hanging on.
4chan: Posts in strict chronological order, bumped by replies. Light moderation. Result: 4chan has a lot of shitposts, but allows genuinely unpopular and marginal views (which includes, yes, a lot of racism) to be aired. 4chan fora punch above their weight in memes and quality posts although the signal to noise is bad. 4chan was the only site that actually matched the mainstream US view that Trump wasn't that bad.
Tumblr: Like Twitter with no limits on posts, much more customizable and "artsy", no date stamping. Result: Lots of cliques, fewer wars than twitter, heavily teen female skew that encourages proliferation of bizarre identities.
I think that what happened to Reddit is first, the echo chamber effect and this can be partly avoided on reddit-like fora like Saidit if the emphasis given to popular comments is reduced. I'd recommend sorting by old as default (or maybe using an HN style sort which boosts new comments - edit). Upvotes are just a little dopamine hit, there's no reason for upvotes to be so important in prioritising what other people see.
Second, Reddit's extreme power exercised by a small clique of SJW mods. Reddit-like fora should actively prevent small numbers of mods from capturing many powerful boards. Maybe there should be a cap on cross-board moderation.
Last, I'd also encourage moderator transparency to embarrass abusers. If there was a public log of who's been banned and by whom and for what, it might help.
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