Well, to explain my own personal journey.
I stumbled upon Debate.Org in high school, my junior or senior year. What drove me toward such a discovery I don't really remember. I think I was looking for a social media platform where I could debate people on any topic I wanted, since I am a person who is naturally drawn toward debate since I prefer to think in terms of epistemic logic and syllogisms and term logic as opposed to be agreeable or let people believe things I believe are patently false.
Naturally, this makes people like me a general nuisance toward society at large (I mean, just look at what Athens did to Socrates!), so Debate.Org was sort of like a salve to a serious everyday problem I faced. In a world where people preferred to get along as opposed to actually agree on things and seek truth and live their lives in reality instead of fantasy, Debate.Org was a sort of release. A place I could be myself.
Well... life got extremely busy. I stopped visiting. I lost a few debates due to forfeiture. I went to college, where I basically found that academia basically built a gigantic wall (built out of subjective sociological research and cherry picking of facts and data to give a faux air of objectivity), around this idea of not offending people by creating a culture where offending people basically became "disagreeing with the research;" research which was extremely flawed to begin with.
So, later in life, after getting into endless arguments on social media, many of which were basically just a contest of who is better at emotional blackmail, a couple years ago I remembered Debate.Org and decided to revisit it, only to find the debates switched from actual analysis, pros and cons, and reasoning to just an extension of the toxic argumentation of other social media. And most of the userbase had left, so all that was left were internet trolls who shouted past each other with sophistic reasoning as opposed to real debate. I mourned the loss of intelligent discourse at this point, and I basically left the website for good.
Fast forward to today, and I came across DebateArt. It reminded me of the once-vibrant, intelligent community that was Debate.Org. The forum section once again had people who focused on reason, proper sourcing, and actually responding with a higher degree of rationality. I once again thought I found a home.
Then I realized that the main reason to be on the website (debates) was almost nonexistent. And the debate topics were extremely nonsensical or, quite honestly, topics I have no interest in. It isn't like Debate.Org where there was always SOMEONE willing to debate ANYTHING, no matter the topic. From cars to whether Kantian or Aristotelian metaphysics is superior, there was a person so passionate on the topic they were willing to match wits with someone else who also was passionate on the topic. And this was great, because people who know absolutely nothing about a topic, but wish to gain a more balanced perspective on it, could read these debates and come across significantly more informed, have good sources to follow up on, and become somewhat of an expert on the topic with the following research through the sources used by either side.
The lack of a community stifles many of the features that are great about a debate website. Having more active users means more debates on more topics that will be worth reading. It would only be as chaotic as one wishes. They can choose to only participate in forum posts they want, read debates they want, and engage in debates they want, since there are many more options to choose from.
I learned quite a bit about some societally important topics from reading Debate.Org debates, and I also was able to better think through some of my positions for topics after debating someone else on them. These are aspects I sorely miss from society at large today. Nobody wants to debate or have a discourse. They just want to shout at someone until the other person accepts.
