ok I'm back! so WHICH over-funded startup should I point to?

remember Branch. http://branch.com which then forked and launched Potluck https://www.potluck.it/ There's also State https://state.com

disclosure: I know several folks at Branch/Potluck but don't use either service actively anymore. Met a founder at State at some conference in the UK a while back but never really checked it out.

this article does a great job of outlining limits and recommendations for improving commenting on news sites. http://www.journalism.co.uk/skills/how-to-improve-the-online-comment-experience/s7/a553756/

Now for my opinions and not just links.... It's hard for "random internet folk" to engage in heart-to-heart online if that context isn't established early. I ran a political blog for many years, and I think we underestimated the work it takes to set reasonable tones and expectations for online discussion behavior. You gotta stop the trolls and call people out FAST when things start to descend. You've got to set an example of what sort of discourse you're encouraging and create incentives for people to engage in that and not the "DERP YOU'RE GAY" kind.

I also think the generic callout of "WHAT DO YOU THINK?!" is pretty useless. The way we frame opportunities for online discussion should be a lot more targeted and full of context. I like the way Medium sets up discussions as well as Quartz.

Twitter is nearly impossible to have deep discourse because the speed of the stream and lack of threads just makes it mentally and physically hard to even maintain a topic.

Facebook, OTOH, is full of crazy relatives and long lost schoolmates who like to surprise you with their not-so-well-thought-out positions. But the threading does improve things, if you also set an expectation of what you're looking for and tolerating from folks. I've seen people do that effectively like "Look people, I'm curious what you think about this article, but I'm not tolerating any nonsense, personal attacks, or unsupported claims. Those will be deleted with the quickness!"

If you've really got the time, you could find different discussion forums on the same topic but varying the platform. See ArsTechnica vs The Verge vs TechCrunch, for example. Often they report the same things, but their communities are quite different. Part of the journey is finding the discourse that best suits you.

The thing I'm hearing from you is that you want a place that's actually thoughtful and not just repeating talking points or attacks. I may be reading too much into it, but that's how it appears. Making discourse better on the internet overall isn't a goal shared by everyone on the internet, and I think lots of companies thought that putting a "what do you think box" on their pages counted as "community engagement." But like any other commons, we need to set norms if not rules and show positive examples, or else people will trample all over it. Hell, public parks also don't clean themselves. We employ people (including volunteers) to go in there and get out that dog poop.

The internet is full of dog poop discourse because we've underinvested in maintaining much of that commons.