We need a scoring on how civil you are in talking to others. We have ‘love/like’ scoring, but we need a ‘civility’ score as well. And those two metric needs to be separate such that you may be hated by the community, but still be given high standing as a civil speaker.
Basically the ‘love’ heart is mostly use when a person likes a post, but we need to encourage people to downvote post that they like if it does not contribute to the quality of a board. E.g. They may mention a support for an issue that you like, but then add an personal attack on another person (which you dislike from a civilised discourse point of view.)
You can then tie this score that keeps track of how civilised you are in your discourse with others. Perhaps you can make it such that if you are consistently good at being civilised in your discussion, your meta-vote would be weighted higher (aka: you are treated more as a moderator). And this would be separate from your popularity/like score.
Plus this can be tracked by forum moderators as a tool to assist in spotting those who incite incivility, even from within their own ideological side.
Is this part of a wider concept of democratic design philosophy perhaps?
On a related note on civilised discourse, I’m thinking that this sort of consideration would lie in the wider context of democratic design philosophy, of which I have a newish forum to encourage designers to think about these things at Designing Open Democracy. Currently just collating various organisations that I think would be related like Discourse. I’ve also noticed that Nation Builder is dealing with a similar potential issue of how to encourage civilised politics (at least within political parties) via software as well. Have Nation Builder and Discourse considered working more together in exchanging design knowledge as well in regards to fostering these kinds of ideals?