Reddit is not a place to have dialogue. Community-moderated areas just aren't very good at it. Even HN has been accused from suffering groupthink. If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.
Reddit is a very good place to have a discussion with a small group of people -- thanks to the orangered envelope you get whenever someone replies to one of your posts. HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage. On reddit, I've had conversations go on for weeks.
> HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage
Maybe if you don't check your threads for replies. Granted, not everyone does that, but I've conversed with more than a few folks long after the original story vanished.
I check the threads link periodically (for example, right now) but I find most other participants in the conversation do not and almost 90% of the time the conversation is dead by the end of the day.
I guess it depends more on who you converse with. I mean, just now, I got here via the threads link and I've already forgotten what story this was under.
> If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.
Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. Perhaps only Slashdot is the only community I've seen where points are awarded to comments not based on agreement, but on general merit. Admit it: you've downvoted people you don't agree with. When enough people do it, you get groupthink.
Forums/mailing lists don't have that problem. Every post is given equal merit in the number of eyeballs that read it. Those comments that are not interesting can get ignored, those that are interesting will either merit a "yeah, I agree" response, or a "you're wrong for [x,y,z]". That is a dialogue. Community moderated upvoted/downvoted discussions are not a dialogue. They are a "here's what we all think" metric.
Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system.
I'd almost argue that groupthink is inherent in human interaction in groups larger than one. Almost.
Forums and mailing lists are certainly susceptible to it, even though it occurs less often, but I suspect that has more to do with the size of their memberships. SA, for instance, has tons of it.
Oh, and /. had a serious problem with it for a long time. Their moderation system helps, and maybe it's gotten a lot better (it's been a while since I was active on it), but oh man when /. was the site, it was pretty bad.
/. is a good example of what seems to happen to a lot of online communities -- a small, competent, awesome base of users is very active for a while, things snowball, you then get a huge upsurge in users and activity and trolling, and then that eventually fades and your userbase stabilizes at a point where the userbase is pretty solid and there's not too much in the way of ridiculousness going on.
Hmm... more specialized fora will have the more concentrated focus of intentionally-informed people who've gathered explicitly to discuss a topic. Too much off-topic noise will get you shunned, because people come there for the signal (Reddit, though I love it, is noise incarnate). With far fewer threads, people maintain a discussion rather than post and run. In far smaller communities, with active posters within Dunbar's number[0], will call you out on your shit or for bailing whenever you get shut down.
Or use Google Chrome/Chromium and get the Chattit extension so you can bicker in real-time!
But seriously most people are members of Reddit, Digg (well..), HN etc. it's not like each website only has the same guys and girls (yes girls!) whether people admit it or not some if not most people read many types of social news websites.
