LW's comment section, as opposed to some other forums/blogs, doesn't seem to me to really encourage comprehensive discussion
Out of curiosity, what about it seems to discourage extended discussion -- is it something like the threading structure or more like the tone and social norms? Or looking at it another way, what other forums seem to encourage fuller discussion and what's the difference between those and LessWrong?
(For context, when I think of other discussion forums, what comes to mind is reddit, facebook and google+ posts, and the comments sections on e.g. scottaaronson.com/blog or marginalrevolution.com. I find the quality of discussions on LessWrong to be superior to all of these. So I'm wondering if you would make a different evaluation, or if you're comparing to different forums.)
Out of curiosity, what about it seems to discourage extended discussion -- is it something like the threading structure
I think the threading structure makes group discussion of a point of contention unproductive. The latest replies are dispersed throughout the page, and there is limited nesting in practice. Lengthy back and forths are left to the small handful of those posting and getting reply notifications.
As far as technology for discussion goes, The Web Zillion Point O has miles to go to catch up to the technology of Usenet and trn.
Every now and then, I write an LW comment on some topic and feel that the contents of my comment pretty much settles the issue decisively. Instead, the comment seems to get ignored entirely - it either gets very few votes or none, nobody responds to it, and the discussion generally continues as if it had never been posted.
Similarly, every now and then I see somebody else make a post or comment that they clearly feel is decisive, but which doesn't seem very interesting to me. Either it seems to be saying something obvious, or I don't get its connection to the topic at hand in the first place.
This seems like it would be about inferential distance: either the writer doesn't know the things that make the reader experience the comment as uninteresting, or the reader doesn't know the things that make the writer experience the comment as interesting. So there's inferential silence - a sufficiently long inferential distance that a claim doesn't provoke even objections, just uncomprehending or indifferent silence.
But "explain your reasoning in more detail" doesn't seem like it would help with the issue. For one, we often don't know beforehand when people don't share our assumptions. Also, some of the comments or posts that seem to encounter this kind of a fate are already relatively long. For example, Wei Dai wondered why MIRI-affiliated people don't often respond to his posts that raise criticisms, and I essentially replied that I found the content of his post relatively obvious so didn't have much to say.
Perhaps people could more often explicitly comment if they notice that something that a poster seems to consider a big thing doesn't seem very interesting or meaningful to them, and briefly explain why? Even a sentence or two might be helpful for the original poster.