Hacker News is the epitome of this! If you find yourself not enjoying your daily dose of "someone is wrong on the internet" (via the immortal https://xkcd.com/386/) as you find yourself crafting the perfect response, you can always close the tab!
and ironically, most of them don't even offer the draft feature! Facebook, tiktok, etc... they send your typed message, but if the app crashes or you close it, there's no draft anywhere you can find ;)
You can, but this is public and maybe you should post. If "you are what you repeatedly do" then we all collectively are what we all do.
If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training is learning that racism is popular, common, normal, and acceptable because everyone is accepting it.
It's a bit like democratic voting, your vote doesn't matter and cannot change things, but it's important that you vote because all of our votes do matter and can change things.
It's a bit like the quote "Dear Board, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Sincerely yours, Groucho Marx.", I am upset and offended every time someone calls out my dumbass comments, but horrified at all the countless times nobody does. Why would I want to waste my time on a site with such low standards that it lets me comment? I'm exhalted and encouraged everytime someone upvotes or engages with my low effort quips[1] but thrown into a chasm of despair that HN users let that pass unopposed. When nobody engages with comments I spent literal hours on[2] I curl up into a ball and die, but also dream of it being a feather in my cap with dang that I'm posting a substantial comment and that will be its own reward. I identify with nobody more closely than Colonel Cathcart, and I will be delighted if someone engages with my Catch 22 reference, but aghast that such a nontechnical reference gets engagment; distraught if nobody engages but delighted that perhaps HN standards are being held higher.
(1) I admire your energy, but sir/ma'am this is a Wendy's.
(2) I am very confused that you thought I was talking about tolerance-of-intolerance types of conversations, when I was more intending to say "I don't need to write an essay responding to technical comments even if I think I have a different angle of technical insight than the commenter, and not worrying about that can be freeing."
(3) For posts like the ones you mention that do trigger the "tolerance of intolerance" paradox, sometimes the very "feeding" of a troll is what makes them feel part of a community, and refusing to engage can indeed be the right way to handle those messages, and the morally correct thing to do.
(4) Not to mention that there are many ways to effect change that are higher-leverage, and less wearing on one's limited stamina, than replying to every disagreeable comment on the internet.
(5) I'm not proud that I've written a five-point answer here. It has not sparked joy, but I've written one anyways. Do what sparks joy, and consider my reply here a cautionary tale.
(2) I didn't think that, it was an example. I didn't want to pick a technology as an example and have my comment be dragged off into whether my pick was good or bad so I tried to pick something away from tech. As in "be the change you want to see in the world", if you want less FORTRAN enthusiasm, counter it, if you want more FORTRAN, add to it. It's easy to see that a site overrun with racism looks like a place that approve of racism, it's much harder to see that a site with 0.001% more FORTRAN content affects anything - that's what the voting comparison was about.
(3) I wasn't really meaning trolling, I was meaning your "someone is wrong on the internet" about some topic you are interested in / care about.
(5) I thought we were all on the "amusing ourselves to death, wireheading, Brave New World, hedonism is bad" train.
You overthink this. Participating in HN is in no way like democratic voting. And sometimes it is my (or yours) comment that is the problem.
Let's not pretend that 90% of HN comments are world-changing. Maybe you are different, but a lot of my would-be comments are knee-jerk reactions that won't actually bring anything substantial to the discussion. Often in political comment chains. Yes, I feel I'm right, but it's still probably not worth posting. I really think that sometimes stopping before posting is better for everyone involved.
I also have well thought comments, where I share my thoughts on things I'm an expert in. I do post them. But a lot of the comments is not really that valuable.
>comments I spent literal hours on[2]
It may make you feel better that I saw both of your posts before (I may spend too much time on HN). They are good, though a bit verbose - maybe this intimidates people. But in this case I agree with GP - if I was spending literal hours responding to comments here I should definitely stop myself.
You’re absolutely right, but I need to go to the bathroom/get some coffee/take a smoke break/get back to this task now so we’ll have to discuss this further later.
I don't know it has as much to do with scale of the system vs the general architecture. E.g. the system I primarily work with these days has millions of lines but most PRs are for a small changes which are well contained in scope by the overall architecture.
It's a cultural thing, but you can do incremental PRs towards a large goal. Giant PRs that are expected to be reviewed never really seemed worth it imho.
I don't think a PR needs to be tens of thousands of lines for a review to take more than 20 minutes. I've worked on projects where you can't reasonably get a branch set up and running somewhere to test it within 20 minutes if you need to set up dependencies, peripherals, external systems, etc.
reasonably you should already know what the code and project is supposed to do before they even start writing code, so you can get directional feedback in.
then you are maybe reviewing 1 out of 7 PRs that implement the agreed upon change
