I’ve been wondering if classroom discussions could be used as a model for how to have online discussions about contentious issues. There are a few “active learning” discussion strategies that might be useful: Active learning - Wikipedia. A basic implementation would be for the OP to ask a question instead of having the OP just make a contentious statement that people react to. I’ve seen people get good results from using this approach on Twitter.
A more sophisticated approach would be to have someone fill the role of teacher/facilitator. They could ask specific participants in the discussion to answer a question. They could also divide discussion participants into collaborative learning groups, or pair participants to implement something like the think-pair-share learning strategy.
They sure do! It may be that to give people sufficient attention in an online discussion will require excluding some people from the discussion. I don’t think having 50+ (guessing on the number here) people posting their thoughts on an issue is satisfying for anyone. Dividing participants into collaborative learning groups could help to give meaningful attention to more participants though. An aspect of attention that’s often overlooked is that people need to both give and get attention. A structure that promotes giving attention while you wait your turn to get attention would be useful.