Online conversations have a habit of proceeding in peculiar ways. Let's take the parody here of an online chatroom discussion, penned by Tim Dowling for the Guardian in 2005, and use it as a case study. Anyone who has ever tried to chat with more than one other person on the net will find it familiar, because communication there tends to break down in predictable ways. So why does it happen, and what can it tell us about the architecture of Cyburbia that it does?

The first thing to note about our chat-room conversation is that its participants all meet as anonymous nodes or peers on an electronic information loop or network. LadeezMan, capitalistpiglet, Bronco, Pashmina and Osama-bin-Laden are unlikely to be using their real names, and this shared sense of anonymity forges a kind of equality among them. By stripping people of their identities and rendering them as anonymous peers on an online information loop, communication in Cyburbia encourages them to speak up more honestly and truthfully than they would if someone in authority was staring over their shoulder.

Learning to trust one's electronic peers, however, can also lull people into a false sense of security. Since everything written in electronic ink usually leaves a clue as to its origins, it is not very difficult to work out who anyone is. As more and more people pile into Cyburbia to make their fortune, too, the signposts there are becoming wilfully confusing. Google's Page Rank system and others like it, the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee explained to me, are becoming skewed by search engine "optimisation" firms who buy up links from an open market to drive traffic in the direction of their clients.

Surely, however, there are gains to be had from communicating with a group via an electronic information loop? That all depends on how you go about measuring the gains from conversation. In our online conversation the naive observer might think that here was a conversation between five parties. To the seasoned theorist of networks, however, that significantly undervalues the explosive growth in possible electronic ties. If each member of our chatroom were to begin a separate conversation with each of the others, there could be as many as 20 different ties or connections forged among them.

Sure enough, the most distinctive thing about conversation in our chatroom is that it immediately splits itself into a number of different conversational streams which makes the conversation progress in a haphazard and non-linear way. Not only are there many different conversational streams, but some members of the chatroom are nimble enough to switch in and out of those different streams as the mood takes them. Rather than moving forwards in the traditional linear way, it tends to spread out in a non-linear manner to encompass more and more different subjects. As information hurtles from side to side between electronic ties, it looks more like a juxtaposition of random statements. The conversation has certainly given rise to an impressive array of electronic ties, but they don't add up to a coherent debate on the subject under discussion.

Perhaps this is all a little unkind. If LadeezMan, capitalistpiglet, Bronco, Pashmina and Osama-bin-Laden had all congregated in a public space instead of rolling up in an internet chatroom, they might still have wandered off the subject and the debate might still have broken down into an unruly cacophony. That's why debates have moderators or chairpersons, to chivvy the discussion along and prevent it being sidetracked or descending into rancour or abuse.

In our online conversation, however, the efforts of the hapless online moderator, Chris2, to keep the discussion on the straight and narrow are either ignored, derided or brushed off in a manner which would be unheard of in an ordinary public debate. Confronted with an authority figure who wants to steer their conversation, our five online debaters simply route around his authority and talk among themselves. Not only that, but some of them also seem deliberately out to rile and provoke him. One way of looking at what they are up to is jamming the system with "noise" or feedback to deliberately undermine his authority.

Hiring an online moderator to hang out and wearily move things along, however, is only one way to try to ensure the orderly movement of traffic in Cyburbia. One common approach, more in keeping with the peer-to-peer architecture of the place, is to sow feedback loops directly into the system so that everyone can rank the contribution of their electronic neighbours and ensure that everything is as it should be. Doing so helps electronic exchanges run more smoothly, but only at the expense of introducing problems of its own.

The online auction site eBay, for example, is stitched together largely by information feedback loops in which buyers and sellers are encouraged to rank each others honesty and reliability. In an intriguing public statement in February 2008, however, the company announced it was overhauling its feedback system to ban sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers. What was happening, eBay admitted, was that when buyers gave "bad" feedback to sellers they had bought from, those sellers were responding by leaving negative feedback of their own. eBay's information feedback loop oiled the wheels of its online auction very nicely, but only by sparking a kind of electronic peer pressure whereby the first person to arrive at a decision in any exchange would likely find it echoed by those they were dealing with. The system resembled a kind of robotic dance routine, in which one dancer's decision to step in one direction leads to everyone else automatically following suit.

Can any of this help improve the quality of debate among our chatroom inhabitants? Sowing an information feedback loop into the system would allow the five members of our chatroom to rank the contributions of their peers, so that later arrivals could see which of them were worth reading. The result would narrow the focus of the conversation and make it much less prone to wandering off into multiple different threads.

But what kind of debate would we get? For one thing, there is likely to be a good deal of mutual back-scratching among our chatroom members when they are asked to evaluate the contributions of their peers. Since early arrivals in the chatroom are much more likely to accumulate good feedback and see their contributions read by later arrivals, the direction of the conversation would also weigh heavily in their favour. LadeezMan, who happened to arrive in the chatroom earlier than anyone else and who already has a firm friend in Bronco, might even find that his contributions end up at the top of the pile. Latecomers should prepare for more earnest disquisitions on the aromas swirling around in his bedsit.

In my book I argue that the architecture of Cyburbia itself – rather than the personality or the character of its inhabitants – changes the way that we try to communicate there, and helps us to understand why communication there frequently breaks down. Does any of this ring true to the users of Comment is free? And if so, can anyone suggest what we might do about it?