My hypothesis: you're a poor judge of whether people are reading an exchange. (where would you get that data?)
So how does your hypothesis explain that these hypothetical other readers consistently read one statement and disagree with it, and then read another statement disagreeing with the first statement, and disagree with that also?
My hypothesis: you're a poor judge of the quality of your comments and posts.
My hypothesis: You didn't bother checking any data before your knee-jerk response, even though it was a button-click away. Honestly, did you?
If I were merely a poor judge, my sample size is large enough that the correlation would most likely be low or random, not strongly negative.
But instead of a hypothesis, let's give you some objective data. Would you agree that higher-quality posts should generate more discussion?
Here are posts I have made, followed by their voted score, followed by the number of comments.
Media bias, 30, 43 - Mechanics without wrenches, 23, 71 - A note on hypotheticals, 18, 17 - Tell it to someone who doesn't care, 15, 34
Correlation coefficient = -.23
Linear regression slope = -1.4
Would you agree that higher-quality posts should generate more discussion?
No. A good troll can get far more comments than almost any high-quality non-troll post. And you also cannot ignore the difficulty of the post, or how much knowledge it presupposes (and thus how small its potential audience is), or whether the post is on a topic that everybody is an expert in (e.g., politics, male-female relations, religion).
David Brin suggests that some kind of political system populated with humans and diverse but imperfectly rational and friendly AIs would evolve in a satisfactory direction for humans.
I don't know whether creating an imperfectly rational general AI is any easier, except that limited perceptual and computational resources obviously imply less than optimal outcomes; still, why shouldn't we hope for optimal given those constraints? I imagine the question will become more settled before anyone nears unleashing a self-improving superhuman AI.
An imperfectly friendly AI, perfectly rational or not, is a very likely scenario. Is it sufficient to create diverse singleton value-systems (demographically representative of humans' values) rather than a consensus (over all humans' values) monolithic Friendly?
What kind of competitive or political system would make fragmented squabbling AIs safer than an attempt to get the monolithic approach right? Brin seems to have some hope of improving politics regardless of AI participation, but I'm not sure exactly what his dream is or how to get there - perhaps his "disputation arenas" would work if the participants were rational and altruistically honest).