You can definitely dig deeper and ask follow-up questions, technology has made this much easier. Most platforms will provide some way to flag a participant and ask them a follow-up question. For example, you can send them a message with the link to the question you want to follow up on.
Treat participants' energy as a scarce resource.
It's a good idea to treat follow-up questions as if you have a limited number of them that you can use and only use them when it's really important.
Here's why: If participants are starting to engage with each other, they'll do so less if you're constantly interrupting. Not only that, but asking people to go back to something they said earlier is like trying to rewind a conversation a few hours or even days - people have already moved on, now their energy is elsewhere so you're taking up a lot of the participants' energy by asking them to go back. When people do go back to a comment, their responses are often not worth the cost in energy.
If you need to post a follow-up question, try to do so as soon as possible after the first comment from the participants on the topic. For example, if the participant says something like, “Yeah, I hate that too.” You might say something like:
Tara, can you specifically say what you hate? Please elaborate a little nepal phone number on your comment. Hopefully Tara will see your question while she is still online.
By making it clear what you're looking for in detail using direct requests and feedback, you can avoid the need to ask a lot of follow-up questions.
Creating a debate on a specific topic within an online community ends up being simple, the difficult part is following up and performing an accurate data analysis that leads you to make better decisions.
Remember that the main function of an online community is to manage your insights intelligently.