I haven’t noticed that online conversations are any more or less researched or convincing in general. This forum and maybe a couple of others seem to be an exception. The usual level of written discourse is just as bad as or even worse than face to face. Just look at Youtube comments, 4chan, or even reddit.
This is very much my experience too. There is also a very high variance in quality of discourse in face-to-face situations.
I think it’s slightly easier to have moderate-to-high quality discussions in asynchronous online writing (assuming that’s what the participants want), because you can treat stuff-you-can-Google-easily as an assumed baseline of knowledge and competence.
A silly idea I have is to model the quality of conversation as a random walk. With no boundary, you will almost-surely sink below the YouTube Comment Event Horizon as time passes. But if you have Wikipedia as a lower bound, the average quality of discussions will tend to increase over time.
I haven’t noticed that online conversations are any more or less researched or convincing in general. This forum and maybe a couple of others seem to be an exception. The usual level of written discourse is just as bad as or even worse than face to face. Just look at Youtube comments, 4chan, or even reddit.
This is very much my experience too. There is also a very high variance in quality of discourse in face-to-face situations.
I think it’s slightly easier to have moderate-to-high quality discussions in asynchronous online writing (assuming that’s what the participants want), because you can treat stuff-you-can-Google-easily as an assumed baseline of knowledge and competence.
A silly idea I have is to model the quality of conversation as a random walk. With no boundary, you will almost-surely sink below the YouTube Comment Event Horizon as time passes. But if you have Wikipedia as a lower bound, the average quality of discussions will tend to increase over time.