I did not realize this was an argument. I guess I lost.
Seriously, though, the most interesting arguments don't resolve for quite some time, if ever. For example, who was the winner in the infamous Torvalds v. Tanenbaum argument over monolithic versus micro-kernels? One could say that Torvalds "won," in the sense that Linux became far more successful than Minix. Yet, Windows and Mac OS are both based, in part, on a micro-kernel architecture, and both have a greater share of the market than Linux.
I'd like to see a scoring system that evaluates the discussion or thread as a whole, rather than the individual contributions; a metric like a signal-to-noise ratio, where a thread gets a higher score for being on-topic and relevant, or a lower score for degenerating into a pissing match.
Well, he's right by virtue of a tautology. Winners are the ones who participate as well. Right or not, it's an asinine comment. I've downmodded maybe 3-4 posts in the past month and this was one of them.
I disagree, and I also think the line between argument and discussion is rather blurry; especially in text-based communication.
One of the most interesting threads I've read lately was that one where Walter Bright posted a comment about D in a thread bashing C++ programmers. His post was attacked by a few others, and the resulting argument was very interesting.
Personally, I think most online discussions are bankrupt. It's time to scrap the whole approach and start fresh. It's not close to how we share knowledge in the real world and simply stating and reading opinions is nothing more than good entertainment.
Perhaps comments could be tagged and any +1 or -1 to a comment would trickle down to all of those tags? Would people take the time to tag comments?
You'd need a way to boil down the answer choices in order to declare a clear cut winner. By boiling it down, you take the personality and shades out gray out of the comment you'd be voting on and therefore much of the value.
Also, if the winning side is a "pro life" tag and you are pro choice, you are unlikely to see much value or be swayed by the vote. I would see such a vote as dumbed down and dig into the comments for the 'real' content.
Maybe you should do this in a meta-site like Disqus, that'd be interesting. I could see why a site like Reddit/Digg wouldn't want to add a feature like this, it would probably encourage the wrong sort of behavior.
But human nature is human nature, there's always going to be a market for a pissing contest, why not capture it? :D
