How google translation works "n practice, languages are used to say the same things over and over again. "

How potentially informative conversations go redundant

There's a dynamic in conversations I'm noticing here, which is probably obvious to everyone else. I think for any given conversation, there are some "attractors"--directions the conversation could go which would be easy for many of the participants, but which would ultimately end all the interesting and useful parts of the conversation. And good moderation/guidance/curation involves steering the conversation away from those attractors.

For example, the talking heads shows I saw when the NYT ran the big story about massive, warrantless wiretapping by the NSA tended to quickly go from a potentially informative discussion about the specifics of the case, to a much easier-to-have discussion[1] about whether the NYT should have published the story, perhaps even about whether publishing it amounted to treason or should have gotten someone arrested.

These attractors happen both because they're easy conversation and because they're useful for propagandists to set up

I'm not sure that the karma system needs to be redesigned-- there's a limit to how much you can say with a number. It might help to have a "that was fun" category, but I think part of the point of karma is that it's easy to do, and having a bunch of karma categories might mean that people won't use it at all or will spend a lot of time fiddling with the categories.

We may have reached the point in this group where enough of us can recognize and defuse those conversations which merely wander around the usual flowchart and encourage people to add information.