I think it’s both somewhat of a bug that can be fixed (and I think we’ve made progress on this in the last year), and just a reality of public communication. I think there is a hierarchy of conversational modes that are more collaborative but require more and more trust among the participants (as Raemon mentioned in his answer), and that conversations usually end up at something close to the lowest level for which there is enough trust among all pairs of participants, which means that any large audience will usually imply a less collaborative communication style.
I think there are some ways around this, and I think the karma system is one of those (by increasing the weight more mutually trusted members have in the conversation, while not fully blocking out newcomers), but it’s overall a hard problem and it’s not clear to me that it can be solved completely with technical solutions.
If true, sounds like a bug and not a feature of lw.
I think it’s both somewhat of a bug that can be fixed (and I think we’ve made progress on this in the last year), and just a reality of public communication. I think there is a hierarchy of conversational modes that are more collaborative but require more and more trust among the participants (as Raemon mentioned in his answer), and that conversations usually end up at something close to the lowest level for which there is enough trust among all pairs of participants, which means that any large audience will usually imply a less collaborative communication style.
I think there are some ways around this, and I think the karma system is one of those (by increasing the weight more mutually trusted members have in the conversation, while not fully blocking out newcomers), but it’s overall a hard problem and it’s not clear to me that it can be solved completely with technical solutions.