A/K/A: "You don't have to attend every argument you're invited to." (Sometimes seen as "fight".) I'd run into this via Noah Friedman on the late, little-lamented Google+.

Discussion, online or off, is ultimately serving some goal. Online mass discussion is often some mix of tactical and strategic.

A late realisation of mine, having been engaged in online discussion since Usenet in the 1980s, is that there are two major divisions of online discussion: dialectical, which is aimed at understanding some greater truth, and rhetorical, which is typically engaged in partisan or ideological promotion. This is a tradition dating to at least the time of the Greeks, see Plato and his tirades against the Sophists, as well as Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations", or as I prefer to describe it: "Bullshit Arguments Which Must Die".

(There are of course numerous other modes of communication and their study is also of interest: narrative, phatic, persuasive, performative (where the speech act itself executes some function, as in swearing an oath or declaring "I do" in a marriage ceremony), descriptive, entertaining, distraction (as with much stage patter in legerdemain, or financial marketing), etc.)

It's helpful to realise what type of discussion you're entering into, as well as what audiences exist (there are often multiple). The audience is often not merely your interlocutor.

For a domain which has come to dominate media, I've found that people in the tech world are often highly dismissive of the field of communications study (and its antecedents in rhetoric and philosophy). "Communications" whilst a popular field of study when I was at uni was not seen as an especially robust or challenging one, a perception of my own I've somewhat come to regret.

Harold Lasswell proposed a five-element model of communications in the 1940s: 1) who 2) says what 3) in what channel 4) to whom 5) with what effect.

I'd add a sixth element: with what intent, though in practice intent is often subordinate to effect for numerous reasons, e.g., ascribing a single intent to a collective entity, unintended and unforeseen consequences, etc.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...>

There's also the matter of understanding mass vs. personal communications, which can be particularly challenging to keep in mind on platforms in which personal exchanges between two parties are also (or can rapidly become) mass or at least public exchanges. (Failure to recognise this seems a frequently recurring source of friction on the Fediverse in particular, with various people asserting the right to speak publicly without others joining in on the discussion.) Simple human psychology makes coping with responses from multiple people, even where that number is relatively low in comparison to a the larger community from which it emerges is challenging. See for example many cases of performers and creators who don't pay attention to general critics and criticism, which is to say, even amongst people whose milieu is the field of mass communications, this can be hard. No wonder it's a challenge to mere mortals....

In a world of hot takes, memetic warfare, and frequently-encountered low-effort, low-comprehension responses, one tactic I've seen (and occasionally used) with some effect is to have and refine over time countermeasures which can be deployed with little effort or cognitive drain, but which effectively communicate a rebutting or countering message. A good example close at hand would be HN's own moderation responses within threads, where many admonitions are frequently recycled, e.g., "Please don't post in the flamewar style".

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

While I'll often write dedicated responses to comments or posts (as here), I've also over time developed a few of my own specific rebuttals to commonly-encountered fallacies and myths, though I try not to post those so frequently that they become an annoyance. I'll also refine thoughts on a specific topic over time (universal content syndication comes to mind) which would be an example of why engaging in specific arguments can prove useful in those instances.

I'm happy to do my part commit denial-of-attention attacks on tired takes as well though, and pay attention to what's living rent-free in my consciousness.