Congratulations on making it into the big leagues and becoming famous in the Paper of Record(tm), if only online. :)
If there's one thing I'd disagree with you about---and it really is a "nitpick"---it's your use of the word "trolling". As you know, I self-identify as one sometimes. The word used to mean something different and a lot narrower when I decided I was one: it was merely someone who deliberately created conflict on USENET, as I recall. And, IMO, that provided a useful function.
So I get that there are websites that do not want to be confined to discussing first principles over and over again. I have participated in these and agreed with the policy, up to a point. But in a lot of the internet, particularly blogs, they have accidentally and in some cases deliberately conflated the two ideas of trolling and harrassing behaviour. This has turned much of the blogosphere into what I call tall opinion silos, and I think this actually covers some of the pathologies of Wikipedia---which for similar reasons as the site to which you linked, I stopped contributing after a brief stint quite a long time ago.
no subject
If there's one thing I'd disagree with you about---and it really is a "nitpick"---it's your use of the word "trolling". As you know, I self-identify as one sometimes. The word used to mean something different and a lot narrower when I decided I was one: it was merely someone who deliberately created conflict on USENET, as I recall. And, IMO, that provided a useful function.
So I get that there are websites that do not want to be confined to discussing first principles over and over again. I have participated in these and agreed with the policy, up to a point. But in a lot of the internet, particularly blogs, they have accidentally and in some cases deliberately conflated the two ideas of trolling and harrassing behaviour. This has turned much of the blogosphere into what I call tall opinion silos, and I think this actually covers some of the pathologies of Wikipedia---which for similar reasons as the site to which you linked, I stopped contributing after a brief stint quite a long time ago.