Places like reddit and slashdot suffer from an interesting effect. There are articles that span the range from silly (and therefore within the expertise of many people) to esoteric and an interesting thing to note is that intelligent comments only happen when the topic:
- Requires a certain degree of knowledge.
- Does not require too much knowledge.
There's this magic band for intelligent discussion, too complicated a topic means that I just look bewildered instead of using mod-points, but too simple means that everyone decides to just sit there and make stupid jokes using long dead memes. Then again, it's possible that these websites aren't actually populated by humans but by chatbots that randomly put together memes.