Edit: How to do this formally? Look at formal systems for hints of how to do it in the 1900s, or category theory for how to do it in the modern day. [0][1]
The point of using a search engine (like elastic) is that you can easily match against n-gram/fuzzy versions of the words. So you can write in a sloppy way and still have it be parse-able. (But that's standard code completion I guess.)
Ideally, if you design it right you shouldn't need to explain the text completion. It adds value by allowing faster typing.
So ideally, you shouldn't need to motivate the feature further. It should pay for itself UX wise. This very much depends on you being able to match your DSL to the domain being discussed. If the domain is politics it is very hard but if the domain is discussion meta, it might be easier.
Another follow up issue is that you want to do more with the structured text. You want it to be interactive, and have effect on the rest of the UI. You want to reflect the semantics of what you're writing. For example, perhaps you can pick out data points from the DSL interpretation and pull it into a common visualization.
Compare with tagging people on Facebook. People do this sort of naturally. This could work in a similar way. Instead of showing suggestions when typing "Bob Smi" it would be suggestions when typing things like "child mortality in ". And the effect of the complete sentence could be to attach relevant data.
Any debate that has hope of progressing the state of argumentation about [topic] will include agreements on definitions and fundamental premises so they don't get bogged down there.
A while back someone who stayed himself an intellectual posted a contrapositive of a statement as if it were a brilliant insight.
My proposal: You write a Medium post with your argument, I'll respond with my rebuttal/response on Medium. That's how the old guys did it, except with letters.
I agree you need much more to make the comments more "unique".
The problem is, that argument mapping and other formal methods have quite a learning curve and do make it even harder for the general public to read / participate.
This strikes me as exactly right. There is no obvious way to formally guarantee that the content of a person's argument actually matches the formal structure that they claim it has.
What's interesting about debate on HN, when it is interesting and illuminating, is that each person debating makes their point while changing the framework of discussion, which questions are most important and so-forth.
I tend to think that the site could do better just having good moderators setting the terms of debate and letting people put forward their positions from there.
The problem with evolving theses is that they invalidate a huge amount of claims and require many claims to be edited.
Threads, where you are not fixed on a particular thesis are of course often more fun, but bring their own set of problems. When a thread goes on for long enough, the different strands are discussing entirely different bits and pieces and newcomers are completely lost, plus the mixing of claims and commentary...HN is truly exceptional with regards to the quality of contributions and I agree, reading comments here is often a wonderful learning experience, one of the very few sites, where I first open the comments, then the linked article.
And yes, we are a bit dry. It's a bit like Wikipedia article editing, less like an enthusiastic commenting thread (https://twitter.com/KialoHQ/status/954461988960251904). But given the nature of our topics, we are happy about things being a bit drier. :)
Imagine the outcry if we forbade users to create their own discussions. We wouldn't have that tabs vs spaces debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486949) :)