A few months shy of his high school graduation, Kal Turnbull came to a realization: Conversations on the internet are broken.

The Scottish teenager had been looking for an online community for friendly debate, a forum whose participants would crack open his mind and fill it with the kinds of perspectives he didn’t get growing up in the Scottish Highlands. But wherever he looked for probing discourse and intelligent discussion, Turnbull found more of the same old junk—bickering, abuse, finger-pointing, and trolling.

And so, like any 17-year-old raised on the internet, he decided to craft his own community in that corner of cyberspace where one's personal dreams are realized: Reddit.

Turnbull's little invention, a subreddit called r/changemyview, began in 2013 as a simple forum for debate: State your belief, explain your reasoning, and ask the many voices of Reddit to convince you otherwise.

Six years later, it’s grown to a community with over 700,000 subscribers, many of whom regard it as an online oasis. Any topic is open for debate: All drugs should be legal, voter ID laws are a good idea, flour tortillas are superior to bread. CMV has captured the attention of journalists, who have called it “our best hope for civil discourse,” and researchers, who have used it to study effective online rhetoric. Jigsaw, the Alphabet-owned tech incubator, has used it as a sandbox to test a comment-ranking engine designed to “detoxify” conversations online.

Turnbull has grown up with the subreddit—he’s now 23, with a degree in civil engineering—and along the way, he’s watched his community grow up too. But as participation increased, he started to see the cracks in Reddit's infrastructure.

Reddit’s ranking algorithm often pushed flash-in-the-pan controversial threads to the top of the page, displacing threads with deep, meaningful conversations. The metric for success on the subreddit—a “delta,” which represents a view that’s been changed—wasn't built into the design; someone hacked together a “delta bot” to keep track, but it required users to copy-and-paste the symbol or type out the string of Unicode characters to produce it. It could be difficult to weed out the worst of the comments, and when someone’s post or comment was removed by the moderators, there was no place that user could go to ask why. Plus, Turnbull and the 20 or so moderators all worked on a volunteer basis. That’s a few dozen people overseeing a community of three-quarters of a million redditors, whose squabbles touch on the most inflamed issues of our time.

Eventually, Turnbull started to think that the community had outgrown its home. “Had we built CMV from the ground up and hadn’t just fit into the Reddit mold, we would’ve done things differently,” says Turnbull.

Today, they are. There's now a new place on the internet to expand your viewpoint: Change a View, which lives at the domain changeaview.com (and yes, the group swapped the "my" in its name for an "a"). The new platform is the result of 10 months of hard work by Turnbull and a small team of dedicated moderators, and it was built with the help of a little funding from Jigsaw. It borrows the same forum architecture and the same strict set of rules as the subreddit, but the goal isn't just to facilitate debates online. Turnbull sees a world where Change a View helps internet commenters see eye-to-eye, where the platform breaks us out of our online filter bubbles, and where we relearn how to talk to each other online. To him, it's not just a forum for interesting conversations. It's a lighthouse for conversation on the internet.