I just wrote a long, considered, friendly, and I hope helpful comment here but -- sorry, I have to see the irony in this once again -- your system wouldn't let me say anything longer tahn 1,500 characters. If you want more intelligent conversations, you might want to expand past soundbite.
In 2008, even before Twitter had become a thing at 180 characters, here's a great reason that people should be posting their commentary on their own blogs.
This example from 2008 is particularly rich as you'll find examples on this page of Derek Powazek and Jeff Jarvis posting comments with links to much richer content and commentary on their own websites.
We're a decade+ on and we still haven't managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.
I'd love to see On the Media revisit this idea. (Of course their site doesn't have comments at all anymore either.)