It sounds like you would enjoy good-faith discussions with reasonable people, regardless of - or even especially if their “side” differs from yours. But, and here I want to make a huge distinction b/t “teasing” vs. this, how do you feel about e.g. brigading/trolling/abusive behavior, when it is done by people on your same “side”, against those dirty, stinky, rotten people on that “other side”? I have never once seen an example of a good-natured discussion on hexbear.net, though I imagine that it surely exists from what people say, yet buried underneath an entire mountain of the “other stuff” that I would not enjoy wading through, looking for the good stuff.

Ironically, that is exactly what I went to Reddit for. And I saw it, in the historical sense, even participated in it here & there infrequently. Though every month that passed I saw it less & less often, as more & more people clamped down on their opinions, b/c of not wanting to have to deal with the push-back from teenagers wanting to use Reddit more as “social media” (where you are allowed, nay encouraged to vomit up your feewings, rather than e.g. search for a logical exposition that already exists and thereby learn by reading rather than opening your mouth to speak). It got to where you couldn’t block enough of them, when they outnumber you and more & more continue to add themselves, each one refusing to learn, each one clamoring to speak (there’s a selection bias here I know, among those that do - but anyway there sure are a lot of them). e.g., 3 posts back-to-back in r/Android like “which phone do I purchase”, “which phone do I buy”, “which Android phone should I get” - all posted within mere hours of one another, none desiring to realize that the question has already been asked, that there is a megathread designated for such, that people might need some additional detail in order to answer it, and that by constantly clamoring like that, they were driving away the very people that have the most knowledge to have been able to answer them, plus taking away the latter’s ability to have conversations about matters of actual substance. So more & more it got to where the blind were leading the blind, b/c the people willing to actually answer thus were not the same as those who wrote long, drawn-out essays full of actual facts, e.g. results of actual tests performed by them or someone they trust, and the latter not without good reason.

As I just started to do with you, with my essays. Sorry - it’s a defensive mechanism, when people (such as done in that other reply) start to challenge me, and I very much want to respond with FACTS… for all the good it will do, to some. While for reasonable people, as you said, the deluge isn’t even needed at all. e.g., all those details about the “event” the other commenter mentioned - Biden, gas prices, inflation - these types of “facts” only matter to people engaging in good faith. Those facts may influence your decision about something-or-other… but not theirs. And if it were me, I would want the facts, so I offer them:-). But there is a time & a place, you are right. I just wanted to point out that the longest paragraphs were those where I even mentioned that I was slipping back into my old habits, developed on Reddit, when having to deal with people that blithely ignore the facts - at which point I should remember more readily that yet more facts, unlike if our roles had been reversed, aren’t going to be convincing.

Though you are a different person than me. Perhaps you can turn off certain portions of your brain that I cannot, and are okay to delve deep into the dark realms, to find something there of substance. I would argue that you don’t even need an account for that - simply reading what is already there should be sufficient, but if you want to ask them questions… no, no, no, that still seems very inefficient, for the very simple fact that: you cannot extract blood from a stone. i.e., you can’t get something from someone when they don’t have it to begin with, so if what you seek is “wisdom” or “understanding”, even of “their side”, then notably I see no evidence that these people even know what their own “side” is espousing, much less have the ability to convey it clearly in words that will be meaningful to you. What *I* see is that they enjoy “dunking on” people, but the “facts” that they choose to use to do that with… are noticeably lacking in substance (which isn’t to say that everything that they claim is incorrect - even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - just that they won’t likely be able to back up their beliefs with more than merely links to articles that themselves are full of logical errors, inconsistencies with actual reality, and “theory” that ignores practical existence). Overall you can learn something yes… but e.g. if you want to know something about monkeys, it is significantly faster to ask an anthropologist than to ask the monkey. But perhaps I am conveying this all wrong: if you watch Innuendo Studios then I am positive that Ian Danskin can explain it much better than I:-). Something along the lines of… they want to live in a magical reality that is (somehow) “correct”, but they are willing to take very many unsubstantiated shortcuts to get there, except most of them (it seems the ones who are most likely to speak outside of their echo chambers) don’t even know what those fundamentals are, and instead just enjoy “dunking on” others who do not know them, i.e. the in-words for the in-crowd act as magical passwords, while the out-group can go fuck itself. To be fair, I see this irl too, and a lot of it (Musk-worship, Bezos-…tolerance, etc.) is a LOT more damaging than whatever is going on over on hexbear, though that does not mean that I enjoy it whenever/wherever I do see it.