It’s good for mental health to preserve the idea that deciding not to respond to a comment does not necessarily represent losing the argument. Especially important if the comments you’re responding to are nonsensical.
Just ask: Would a reasonable person I respect be swayed by the argument I’m eager to reply to? If not, just leave.
So many comments that are backspaced into oblivion after thinking "do I care enough to subject my ideas to the public sphere?" " Will my voice be heard or make any difference?"
If the answer to both is no, which it usually is... I just let it go and move on with my day.
Yup. I will "respond" to so many things, but I tend to not post the response. Just typing out my thoughts is usually enough, and when thinking more critically of what the motivation of my response is, it usually tends to boil down to "I want this other person to think I'm correct". But that's exactly why they responded first, and then it turns into an argument. No one is trying to learn, we're trying to win.
Yepp, most arguments are like this.. people have also become a lot more opinionated than they used to be thanks to the internet. This actually happened to me yesterday and I typed my comment out 3 different ways until I gave up. Wasted 10 minutes of my lunch break trying to figure out if I needed to be subscribed to the community first to comment lol
That's fine if you're trying to get into an argument. If you're just answering someone's question or sharing a story or whatever, it's frustrating as hell when your post fails over and over. I'm getting sick of being told to check my language settings in my profile, even though no such setting exists and it had nothing to do with why my submission failed. Maybe that's just a wefwef thing.
The number of times I've typed up a comment, then just deleted the whole damn thing is quite high. Often, it's just not worth it, even if someone is wildly misinterpreting what you're saying.
Whenever it sits there spinning and thinking for a minute, I copy the text I wrote so when it fails, I can try again.
I always copy longer messages no matter the platform, it's way too often they disappear for me to risk it
Reload
Get taken back to landing page
Forget what you were going to say by the time you find the post again
Such is life
They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That's the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.
Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren't in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.
People don't want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.
