“Why is a fishbowl more productive than debate? The small group conversations in the fishbowl tend to de-personalize the issue and reduce the stress level, making people’s statements more cogent. Since people are talking with their fellow partisans, they get less caught up in wasteful adversarial games.” - the Co-Intelligence Institute

Participation in online forums tends to follow a “power law,” with unequal engagement. One remedy for this is simply for the most active participants to step back, and moderate how much they speak (see Carrying Capacity). OWS uses a similar technique in their “progressive stack.”