What’s an “official” political debate? The government runs no such thing.

Also in general, many debates on TV are jest talking, no winner is declared. It’s the opposite of a competitive format.

That’s not the WHY. Debate isn’t trying to be like politics, but having formalized competitive rules for arguing is pretty difficult so there are a lot of ways to game the system. It’s not trying to model a broken world.

Can we get this information in any reasonable format? Preferably paragraphs of text, second to that an audio file, third to that a video player that actually works?

Your oversimplification makes it sound like this is just my personal preference, and not a natural tendency of humans or social media interactions.

This is not just “I like X more”, this is “humans on a large scale act like probabilistic decision trees and will converge on lowest common denominator dopamine fountains without careful checks and considerations”

The latter is necessary for high quality networked media and discussion

If an account is upvoted because it’s posting high- quality content, we’d expect those votes to come from a variety of accounts that don’t otherwise have a tendency to vote for the same things.

No, I completely disagree and reject your premise.

Many times really high quality content will be voted for by only a small subset of the population.

In general people will vote for lowest common denominator widely appealing click bait. That type of content will get varied voters because of wide appeal. Discerning voters represent a smaller but consistent subset of the population, and this proposed algorithm will penalize that and just lead to more low quality widely appealing click bait.

What if account B only ever posts high quality content? What if everybody upvotes account B because their content is so good? What if they rarely post so it would be reasonable that a smaller subset of the population has ever seen their posts?

Your theory assumes large volumes of constant posts seen by a wide audience, but that’s not how these sites work, your ideal would censor and disadvantage many accounts.

“why did my rent go up by 400 dollars?” “Because my favorite bagel spot raised prices by a dollar”

Especially when the statement makes no sense

While I appreciate the sentiment, theft of service is a crime. You don’t have to be able to own something to be able to steal it.

While I appreciate the sentiment, theft of service is a crime. You don’t have to be able to own something to be able to steal it.