I think the reaction system is bad for narcissistic personalities, because it makes them believe that getting a bunch of thumbs up or fires or whatever validates their viewpoint. You'll see that type of behavior a lot with the (now mostly banned) GAF celebs.
In turn, this kills learning anything from a discussion because in their mind they're right no matter what, and that confidence prevents them from ever admitting they were wrong in the first place, even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That same confidence I think will convince a lot of other random users that are uneducated about the topic at hand, so they just casually adopt the same views instead of doing any research to form their own opinion. There's only so many things that you can TRULY care about, so I myself do this quite a bit. Read a thread, get the top 20 or so replies and form my opinion based on that. It's a mistake for sure, but who's going to google every damn thing that comes up in day to day life to have an educated opinion? Not many people. Also, when you get that one poster that makes a detailed and thorough post, do you ever find yourself just believing it wholesale because of the format, quality, and length of the post? I wonder how many of those posts are just made up on the spot or severely twisting reality, knowing full well that nobody is going to bother to fact check any of it. The scary thing is, a lot of times, these types of posts then become "fact" and get parroted and regurgitated all over the place.
I think in general, people's distaste of admitting they were wrong or making compromises on the internet is a big reason why you have the us vs. them thing going on everywhere. I'm sure that most of you notice that this doesn't happen as frequently in the real world because there you have to actually see the person you're disagreeing with and that brings in a different dynamic to the conversation and usually keeps people from being total shitlords to each other. 1 on 1 conversations about things even more so.
I don't think that people were meant or equipped to get all of their social interaction over the internet, but a combination of technology and COVID distancing has pressed the fast forward on the effects of doing so.
Anyways - on topic, yea, I've learned quite a bit from convos on here, and have changed my viewpoint quite a few times as well. I miss the higher quality posting in general that we had in like 2010, and I really miss talking about playing video games, which almost nobody on this forum does anymore. Now it's all drama, rumors, clickbait, opinion pieces etc. |OT|s for most average budget games die in about 10 pages or less, most smaller games don't even warrant enough discussion to build OTs for anymore. Monster Hunter Stories 2 only had 2-3 people discussing the game at all, and that was for a few weeks after release in the launch trailer topic.
I guess I'm getting a bit off topic here, so I'll just say that I wish that there were more people that would at least listen and have their replies listened to because I think breaking down the walls that everyone constantly has up is the first step to people treating each other with respect again.