I understand and agree with the wider point you made, but specifically on this the major issue I find is precisely with people believing they have nothing to contribute and have no intervention to gently kick them into questioning that premise. There’s no end of idiots who are keen to leap on “new topic” or “reply”…
I think there’s data out there showing twitter posters and respondents are a tiny fraction of the base, (those that are human anyway), attacking the assumption clearly held by the majority of people that they’ve nothing to say could/should be a guiding principle for something like discourse (which already does a great job anyway) seeking to differntiate quality of discussion vs anything else.
Empirically I think most people feel they have nothing worthy to say, they’re very likely wrong and for discourse’ purposes that’s market inefficiency that could be attacked for great platform advantage.