I believe, based on forum participation, that locking a discussion into a single thread inevitably leads to nonconstructive trolling or offtopic flaming.
I can tell when a given thread has disolved into idiotic trolling and tangential discussions and I usually seek out a similar thread with more reasoned participants but often this is made impossible by thread deletion and topic funneling.
For example, I was extremely upset during the RealID debate because I wanted to discuss sub-issues within the issue: how much can you really discover from a name, were women right to fear the repercussions of RealID more than men, etc. But because all posts on the RealID were funneled into one giant mega topic these discussions were fragmented and effectively silenced by the mechanics of chronological posting.
A lot of forum visitors, like sharks to blood, are drawn to a thread simply by it's popularity -- an obvious byproduct of topic funneling -- which leads to a degraded conversation as uninterested parties "contribute" to the thread while having no real predisposed interest in the actual topic.
Confining a discussion to a single mega thread is *always* a death sentence for that topic. If that is the goal of topic funneling then, well, so far it has been quite successful. If there is in fact another goal in this redirection I apologize because it is not clear to me.
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