Thread:Feedback/Social effects of quoting/Gmaxwell (6)

I find your restated position compelling: I think my own experience also supports that position that extensive line by line quoting encourages people to argue past each other and nitpick over semantics rather than reach an understanding and that the difference in quoting norms tends to make wiki-discussions, where you answer close to what you're commenting on but actually breaking into argument or quoting it is very rare, more friendly.

I think presenting quoted material with special formatting will help readers but that requires special markup and the mark-up has usability and discoverablity problems which the software can address... But I am at a loss as to how the software can facilitate the reasonable uses of quoting without encouraging the harmful ones.