I'd like to increase transactions and have more discussion about the content that is posted.

At the moment, loads of interesting articles and links get posted, but there are often no comments or little discussion arising as a result. I think the desire for 'thoughtful interaction' is preventing people from expressing less 'thoughtful' ideas (e.g. how a post makes them feel or maybe raising a small somewhat unrelated issue). However, I often find some of the best discussions that I have within good communities on reddit start from a really small idea or comment.

As an observation, I think this may be in part driven by culture (the community seems to be a relatively narrow demographic) and in part due to design (the only way to interact with content is to share or write comments as opposed to interact in other ways). The share functionality doesn't seem that relevant to me, as there is still relatively little content being submitted, so I just use the global feed to find new interesting things. But beyond being able to share, there is no other forms of interaction I can have with posts/comments other than write something intelligent, which I often don't have time for or my limited knowledge may prevent (even though I might still have an opinion).

It would be interesting to know the number of shares vs. the number of views for a post? Not always visible but just to see if people are interacting with the share button.

I realise this has turned into a bit of a ramble without actually coming up with anything specific, but hopefully it's of some use.