A) Meatier comments/debates require a certain level of trust that the debate is about ideas and not about pecking order. That is enormously hard to achieve in most settings. It gets harder when the community grows. A smaller group is much more able to know each other and all that.
B) My best understanding is that formality is what older cultures with larger populations moved towards as a solution for such problems. I know I find some stuff at work endlessly annoying because of the disconnect between the setting and the social behaviors/assumptions. My mom is European and my dad was career military and my ex husband was career military. Europe and the American military are both more formal cultures than the American Deep South where I grew up (and live currently). I find some of the assumptions of more 'casual' cultures to be very uncouth.
I don't know how to raise the bar on formality for a place like HN but my best guess is that would help with this particular issue. I like a good, healthy debate. I rarely engage in it because most "debates" are really fights (ie they are "arguments" in the other sense of the word -- emotional, social, ugly), not intellectual discussions.
Anyway thanks for tossing me a clue. That does help me think about the issue, unlike most of what I read in these discussions.
