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@itsbruce
Webforums. They reduce discussion to the lowest common denominators and reward trolling over intelligent conversation.
In the early days of the public Internet, most ISPs provided Usenet (usually not connected to public Usenet) for discussion forums. They pointed their mostly Windows-using customers to Outlook Express, which wasn't a wonderful client for anything but did support Usenet. And so there was genuintely threaded discussion. Actual branching threads mean there's much less thread derail because people not interested in the tangent don't read that branch and just follow the main conversation; it's easy, if you find you've followed a branch that's lost value, to backtrack and go down a more constructive path. Even though Usenet is where flame wars and spam originated, they were less of a problem for the same reason.
Sadly, pretty soon they all provided web interfaces to the forums as well. Despite there long having been Usenet web interfaces that support actual branching threads, that's not what they used. And as both Usenet and Outlook Express became less generally used, flat "threads" - where you have to page through all the shit to pick out the constructive bits - became dominant.
Sometimes the market just goes down the wrong damned rabbit hole and never comes out. Webforums are one of those. Fuck webforums.