I cannot help but feel that an infinitely better approach to debating things philosophically would be to use a board such that the postings come in this structure:
-Thread starting post
–Reply to thread 1
—Reply to Reply 1
----Reply to Reply 1.1
----Reply to Reply 1.2
–Reply to thread 2
—Reply to Reply 2.1
or an example might be
-Cheese is great because it smells nice
–Cheese smells of poo
—No it doesn’t, it smells of cheese
–It’s great because it has the power to destroy you all
—It has no power, it is inert
—No, that’s why it’s evil
----Something can be both evil and great
It means one doesn’t have to trawl through 16 pages of an interesting thread to get to the point where you can reasonably reply. By the time you get to the end you can’t remember what points have or haven’t been raised anyway 
What is more, it makes it clear what stage the debate is at, what comments have or have not been rebutted yet.
It should also reduce the possibility that ideas get needlessly repeated.
If each of those is just the title, with a link to the post, then some posts could be linked such that eventually it wouldnt be a simple family-tree-esque affair, but in fact a vast web or complex of arguments and their rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. Obviously, an argument for something such as ‘Something can be great and evil’ bears a relation to more things than just the smell of cheese.