I was thinking that the random person's opinions about how the mainstream moral climate is the right and proper thing haven't been preserved for me to read, and whatever did get preserved has probably been heavily filtered for being well-argued and interesting, but that's not quite right. They did have newspapers, which would be archived somewhere no matter what the content, and all sorts of weird random pamphlets probably are as well. Still a lot more editorial control than Reddit, but editorial control by the contemporary people, not by present-day scholars composing the Collection of Olden Time Moral Arguments Affirming The Great Historical Narrative For Moral And Intellectual Progress. I was analogizing the current blogs and reddits thing with people ranting to each other at bars or something, with most of the arguments being at the quality of a random people ranting at you, but on second thought that's not really a good analogy. Face to face socializing has pretty different dynamics than media culture, and the media culture was editorialized newspapers and books and the odd self-published pamphlet by someone with enough money for that. A third thing, which would be relevant and would be hard to go back and assess now was how community level social persuasion got done. What kind of arguments did priests use trying to convince the congregation that women's right to vote would lead to the apocalypse, what kind of arguments did the scruffy guy on the soapbox use trying to convince factory workers to start hanging fat people with top hats and monocles from the lampposts and so on. So I could figure out what was a popular newspaper and go read through its archives, or try to figure out which books where bestsellers and see if I can somehow find a copy and read that, and I might actually learn something more interesting about the common quality of argumentation used than by just picking up filtered-by-present-day recommended books that might be systematic outliers.