Tools to facilitate healthy discussion

Many moons ago, when I was a wee undergrad, I went to a grad student research talk. Their work was all about online discourse, specifically contentious debate about loaded topics (frankly quite a bit ahead of its time, since this was like 15ish years ago). And they built proof of concept tools that could layer onto bulletin board platforms to try to facilitate more healthy dialogue. In the years since, one concept he showed has always stuck with me, embedded in the back of my mind because it was so simple yet so clever. Essentially, when someone wanted to respond to another person's message, they *first* had to restate the position of that person *in their own words*. OP would then be able to approve or reject that restating, based on whether or not it was an accurate representation of what they had said. If and only if it was approved, the responder would then be able to post their own entry in the conversation. Obviously, it's not a silver bullet solution. People can still disagree, you can still have people arguing in bad faith. But the core hypothesis was about active listening; people so frequently just want to state their own opinions, and dismiss others out of hand without taking time to really reflect process what they are pushing back against, that introducing a speed bump that forces them to take a moment and process an opinion they disagree with can yield benefit. It humanizes the person on the other side. It can force some introspection. And sometimes, it can even help clarify a misunderstanding that fuels disagreement. Was thinking about it recently again, and I think it could be really interesting to consider what something like this might look like on Digg. Perhaps as an optional system that could be selectively enabled on certain communities that want it.