Proposal: Community Sourcing
The Problem
A large problem in internet communities is internet debates that devolve into metadiscussions on credibility. This likely isn't bad, because the default alternative is generally large-scale misinformation campaigns.
Examples
Tildes hasn't been free of this, naturally; for a (very) recent example, see this thread on Andrew Yang's climate change proposals.
I, personally, have partaken in a thread that seemed as if it might head in the same direction; take a look at this thread, on gun suicides of a certain population & aggravating factors of them. A third-party delivering a breadth of sources seemed to have stopped it in its tracks, however.
Solution
It does seem to me like something that could be solved—or at least mitigated—at the platform level, with a feature that would allow other users to cite sources for a comment in question, ideally with community ranking of those sources.
Getting rid of the question of credibility in casual discussions in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow of dialogue seems like something that would undoubtedly help The Conversation™ flourish, while simultaneously preventing disinformation catastrophes.
As pseudonymous commenters on the Internet, I think we need to be humble.
First, whatever credibility you might have in real life, other people reading don't know about it unless you tell them, and even then they have to trust that you are who you say you are. This trust builds up slowly as we get to know each other. (Possibly something could be done in software to help us recognize each other more easily?) It helps to briefly introduce yourself if you do have some expertise or relevant experience, if you can avoid making it sound like "bow down before my authority". Even experts can be wrong.
Second, most people are not experts in most subjects that appear in the news, even those they feel strongly about. You might feel like a reasonably well-informed, intelligent person compared to some of the more extreme commenters out there, but it's something of an illusion. It's important to avoid "instant expert" syndrome where suddenly you're making strong assertions about things you just learned about last week, and not be offended if people treat what you say with uninformed skepticism.
I don't think we can vote our way to making a reliable knowledge-base. This is sort of like trying to emulate /r/askhistorians without having any historians. It can't really be done. The closest thing we have to crowd-sourced knowledge is Wikipedia, and they are better at it than we're likely to be. Voting will eventually be important for filtering, but it's more "this is interesting".
So, if we first admit that we are amateurs and don't really know much, what can we do together that's useful? We can still share links and talk about them. We can speculate. We can share personal experiences.
I think the best guard against disinformation is feeling comfortable with uncertainty. Collect questions and keep answers tentative. Most of the time, we are just here for entertainment and exploration. We have no important decisions to make and don't really need to decide what to believe.
And that implies respecting others when they remain uncertain and unconvinced. Heated arguments might be avoided or diffused if we stop to remember that. (The "burden of proof" is misleading because it implies that proof is possible, and we aren't doing math here.)
Do you use Lobsters heavily zoomed-in or use something more (browser extension?) to be able to tell people apart from their avatars? I've always felt like about 95% of the avatars on Lobsters are either the generic identicon-style patterns or just a vague head shape at the tiny size they're displayed (both of your examples are vague head shapes), so they're almost totally useless for recognizing anyone except for the few people that use especially distinctive ones.
I was thinking about a minimal version of this. Suppose you could put one Unicode code point after your username in posts? Then we could identify ourselves with emojis.
There are a lot of subtle details though. If you change your emoji, what happens to your signature on previous posts? Do they stay the same? This is how we did "pseuds" on the Well, and it is quite fun. People changed them all the time. It might detract from the purpose of recognizing people though.
Also, socially, there's a question of how how else they might be used. For example, suppose people start using national flags to identify the country they're from? (It's more than one Unicode code point, but ignore that for the moment.) There would be good things about that like meeting people from the same or different countries, but it might lead to some kind of tribalism, compared to personal emojis used to represent individuals.
Paging @Amarok! Your presence is required. This idea suggested by @Eva (using sources to squelch debates) is something I've seen you advocate before.