There’s also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It’s why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there’s already 1,000+ comments there.
There’s also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It’s why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there’s already 1,000+ comments there.