I sometimes wonder what would happen if you built a site like HN or reddit where, as a condition of membership, you sometimes are asked to really probe the depths of a comment you make. Why you selected specific words, who you expected to read your comment, how you expected the content and the style to be received, how you felt about its evident reception. Maybe haul other commenters or up/downvoters into the conversation, how the comment influenced their perception of the individuals in the thread, how they would view future comments from these individuals, etc.
I’m guessing there have been studies of a similar nature, but not in a way that’s public or where you may get to know some of the participants before/after these little exposes.
For my part i stopped reading the comment you replied to after the first sentence. People that don’t have enough self control in the instant to moderate their speech to a basic level of civility aren’t likely to follow it with nuanced perspective.
I'd rather have a site that condensed the main points of a comment, merged it with similar sentiments when appropriate, and kept track of the popularity of that viewpoint. It would solve the problem that, what, 70% of the comments on here are just repeating the same ideas. It seems like we're a few years away from it, but I think it is coming.
I agree with you. Seems I cannot edit the comment now, and this is not an excuse by any means, but the first sentence came as a visceral reaction to the obvious uninformed and fear-mongering tone of the person I responded to.
In my opinion there is zero excuse for whataboutism and I heard a story that said that...
I think part of the problem with today's society is that nobody calls BS anymore and we are more concerned with not being perceived as aggressive vs grounding people into reality. We get to make our own "facts".
That being said, there is a way to call BS without being rude but refuting BS is usually an order of magnitude harder than generating. Also, in my experience, a lot of time people that are spewing BS are not interested in a constructive conversation. They just want to feel smart and/or like hearing themselves talk.
