The other day, a group of Americans gathered together to deliberate the wisdom of a war with Iraq.

D. started it off with harsh words for President Bush, arguing that he just wants a war to distract the nation from other ills: ''Face it America, [Bush] is nuts, and is as dangerous as any outside terrorist we could possibly face.''

K. fired some harsh invective back. ''You moron Hussein butt kissers are proving the fools that you are,'' a retort that E. parried with ''Will you imbecilic right-wing armchair commandos ever tire of calling anyone a `Saddam lover'?''

L. ignored the two prior debaters, looked straight at D., and let it rip. ''You're a moron. I won't even begin to point out all the twisted logic in your [comment].'' But D. had an immediate rejoinder to that: ''Thanks! Coming from you, I'll accept that as a compliment.''

If possible, the discussion disintegrated further. Everyone talked past, around, and through each other. No one, presumably, left knowing anything more about Iraq.

Of course, this conversation didn't occur at a university round table or in Harvard Square over tea and scones. It took place on the Yahoo! political discussion message board. The potshots above represent just a small sample of the discussion on an early October evening. But many of the 125,000 comments about the war posted in increasing numbers over the last 12 months display the same unedifying, sophomoric tone.

And the problem goes well beyond big sites like Yahoo! Just three years ago, Internet chat and political discussion boards were supposed to help usher in an electron-based Jeffersonian idyll, ''delivering democracy to your desktop, '' as the logo of the prominent and well-funded site voter.com proclaimed. Venture capitalists tossed around sacks of money and some of the brightest minds in politics, such as Carl Bernstein and Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, joined online projects aimed at helping the masses deliberate on political issues and hold their leaders accountable -- for example, by making it easier to contact your representative.

Unfortunately, as we now know, the masses generally don't want to deliberate or hold anyone accountable online, least of all themselves. Once behind our keyboards we want to rant, belittle, and hoot about sex. The major democracy start-ups of the late '90s have long since closed shop, and many of the top general political sites, including CNN, have shuttered their discussion boards, too. Journalists rarely bother venturing into the swamp to look for tips or insight. In a recent survey by George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, a mere 2 percent of journalists in Washington described chat rooms and message boards as useful to their work.

One problem with Internet conversation, of course, is the lack of nonverbal cues. In face-to-face conversation, empathy comes more naturally than it does online or over the phone. Consciously or not, we watch our conversational partners' body language, pick up on changes in their tone of voice, and sense their emotions from signals that are both more subtle and more powerful than exclamation points or screaming capital letters. In-person communication builds trust; Internet communication often fuels alienation. The anonymity that most boards allow only compounds this problem.

Political Internet boards tend to attract people with unusually shaky conversational skills. According to Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the communication department at the University at Albany, SUNY currently studying the sociology of political bulletin boards, most users rarely discuss politics elsewhere. They see the boards as outlets, not as places to learn and discuss. Fredefrekl, a Yahoo! user who contributed to the Iraq debate with a message titled ''mommy, my butt itches,'' backs this up. When I asked him via e-mail why he bothered to post drivel, he responded, ''I think people who post on message boards are a special kind of breed. We are angry and feel impotent in normal situations. Message boards are our only means of expressing ourselves and feeling validated at the same time.''

It's relatively hard to identify experts or sort out reliable facts in online political discussion. Discussion boards devoted to technological and scientific subjects -- most notably the popular computer programmer and hacker site slashdot.org -- break into far fewer shouting matches; in large part, that's because one can quickly tell whether a poster has a clue. This not only helps users filter out gibberish but also provides disincentives for spouting off. It's vastly easier to rant about even obscure topics related to Iraq -- the expected role of the Shiites in the southern city of Basra, for example -- than to rant about the Unix underpinnings of the new Macintosh operating system. If you don't know anything about Unix, you can't really say anything. If you don't know anything about Basra, you can still announce that all right-wingers are armchair commandos. And, boom, once a few people have disrupted a political thread, the more level-headed of the original debaters quickly abandon it. ''You can have a good discussion going on, but it's a fragile thing. It only takes a couple of Visigoths coming in and breaking chairs and the discussion goes to hell,'' says Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate.com, which runs ''The Fray,'' one of the most popular political discussion sites.

Some of the problems are, of course, solvable. Yahoo! and Slate staff members remove irrelevant posts from their boards, and messages with curse words are automatically deleted. Slate also says that it blocks access for about 30 people a day who abuse the discussions. The site has also begun compiling a daily log of the best posts, selected by ''The Fray'''s editor, partly to encourage posters to shoot for insight and rigor.

The site e.thePeople.com allows users to evaluate each other's posts and then displays each post's overall score -- a method based on those used by slashdot and by plastic.com, a cultural-criticism site whose underlying architecture is modeled after slashdot's.

Still, no one has really found the right formula for conducting a political discussion. The message boards on Slate and e.thePeople show a dramatically improved level of insight in recent months, and their overseers are still searching for ways to cultivate more Ciceros and fewer Visigoths. But most online conversations fail to reach even minimal standards of coherence. For example, when Slate posted a compendium of the best reader comments on a story about Robert Torricelli's withdrawal from the New Jersey Senate race, its link to the best response brought one to a post slamming Jesse Jackson in obscene terms.

There is still reason to hope that online political discussion will mature into something truly useful over time. After all, the form has just as many advantages as drawbacks. Yes, online discussion makes empathy difficult, but it also lets people correspond on their own schedules from anywhere in the world. Yes, it allows people to fire off rants, but it also allows them to circulate carefully sourced and annotated arguments augmented with ready access to incredible archives.

Two years ago, Ralph Nader griped that ''letters written years ago between politicians...were much more thoughtful than in recent years because they were rarer events and took longer to get there. E-mail is at the other extreme, quick, cheap, and too often thoughtless.'' True. But when he wrote that, Nader was himself responding quickly and cheaply -- to a Slate reader who had posted in the Fray. In other words, the Net may dumb down discourse, but it also gives people an opportunity to reach someone like Nader -- an opportunity that was unimaginable before the rise of this open, if chaotic, forum.

Perhaps online discourse will follow the same arc that so many other Internet phenomena have traced: overenthusiasm, a crash, and then, quietly, something extremely useful rising from the ashes.

The rise and fall of companies like eToys.com and Pets.com got a lot of press. But even as the dot-coms crashed, old-economy companies like UPS were quietly figuring out how to use the Internet to make back-office operations such as package tracking vastly more efficient. Meanwhile, political-candidate Web sites were touted as revolutionary and ridiculed when they turned out not to matter much. But that hasn't stopped smart candidates from figuring out how to use the Net as an extraordinarily useful get-out-the-vote tool. This spring, Rod Blagojevitch, the winner of the Illinois Democratic gubernatorial primary, used the Net to track voter turnout by county and organize the last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts that led to his very narrow victory.

What's the equivalent for online discussion? It might well be the use of the Internet to facilitate small group conversation where everyone involved has a stake in a productive exchange. This approach has proved fruitful in several neighborhood-based discussion groups; indeed, the mayor of Minneapolis, R. T. Rybak, says he decided to run for office because of the Minneapolis-Issues list, an e-mail discussion list dedicated to local political matters that Rybak initially participated in simply as an avid poster. Gradually he made online friends, and, as the discussion of the city's problems evolved, they persuaded him to run and then helped him win.

There are also new software applications that may help the cause. For example, the software and communications company Bodies Electric has developed a Web-based ''deliberation tool'' called Unchat (www.unchat.com) that attempts to simulate face-to-face human interaction. Users are identified by their real names; they have to look at virtual libraries of relevant texts before joining a conversation; and they can classify their posts according to tone of voice -- noting, for example, whether their post should be read as a shout.

A nonprofit called Web Lab (www.weblab.org) has organized effective large group discussions online, most famously over the redesign of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Its main trick is breaking people into small groups moderated and coordinated by members with temporary powers to direct the discussion, a simple change that seems to block out most of the anonymous ranting that torpedoes many larger conversations. ''On most message boards, the bad drowns out the good. We've found that, in small groups, the good drowns out the bad,'' says Marc Weiss, the organization's founder.

Maybe the best evidence that something will ultimately turn the Web into a productive, deliberative forum comes from Fredefrekl. The author of ''mommy, my butt itches'' says he wouldn't send such messages in a small group setting. ''I think what appeals to posters is the mass audience, or at least the potential of a mass audience,'' he writes. ''People,'' he adds, do not look to message boards for ''group therapy,'' but for ''venting.''

At least the people who use them now do.