I don't understand how those two sentences are related. I've never heard a political or ideological battle explained as being "curiosity destroying".
As a quick heuristic, if there are more than 150 comments, there's a high probability that it's descended into either an ideological battle, or an obtuse snark-fest over semantics or edge cases.
It’s a symptom of an imperfect commenting system.
With a better system, just like in real life, I would more easily be able to only pay attention to the things I want to pay attention to.
totally agree, but I'd love to see a technology that's even better than real life like a discussion site where for each post, users could navigate a 'discussion topology/taxonomy' (i don't know the real terms?). There wouldn't be a need for adding comments that are just restating a position, you would just 'vote' for the position. You could add a new position, a new reason for a position, or new evidence for a reason for a position. The meta discussion the topology itself would be interesting. It would rarely achieve conflict resolution, but it would force us to better define our positions/reasons/evidence/core beliefs, and maybe help us understand others