Comment by archagon
11 hours ago
Respectfully, I think it’s impossible to have “real conversation” on a site where users are (essentially) anonymous, discussions are threaded, and comments are boosted or hidden based on their upvotes. For deep, nuanced discussions where people can actually change their minds, you want a discussion board — but it’s a paradigm that’s difficult to scale, and so isn’t compatible with the modern notion of social media.
I'd replace "real conversation" with "community". And I think communities don't prohibit anonymity. I think the impossibility is really having a community with a very large active userbase. A macro version of Dunbar's number.