I've been looking for intelligent conversation online for over 25 years. For a time it was Usenet. I mostly missed the Well, though I caught mailing lists, Slashdot, and for a brief moment, G+ (it's still there, and I've cultivated a useful community, though the reach is small).<p>I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies, and frankly was surprised at the results:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...</a><p>The methodology uses the <i>Foreign Policy</i> Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.<p>As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.<p>Facebook beats G+, largely.<p>Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.<p>The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it <i>exceptionally</i> good.<p>But blogs suck for <i>exposure</i> and <i>engagement</i>.<p>This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)<p>One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the <i>default</i> "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly <i>ignore</i> would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.<p>As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design (<a href="http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB" rel="nofollow">http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB</a>) and static site generators.