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> This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics

No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.

There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.

Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.

Interesting -- what other system could you possibly have, other than votes...? I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. I guess traditional forum threads (sometimes with votes, a-la GitHub) are nice, but ultimately that's just trading "correct sounding" for "early commenter".

Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).

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