Do Some Debaters Display Pathological Antagonism Here?

MayCaesar

I think that, rather, indirect communication like the one people have on forums or media platforms anonymously makes it hard for the actors to see those they are interacting with as human beings - they only see some text written by someone they have never met, so their mind disassociates the entity that stands behind that text from the person who wrote it, and they communicate with that entity itself.

Say you meet someone regularly in person. Every time that person posts something on an online platform, you see the person behind the words clearly - so you communicate approximately as civilly as you would in person. You will never say 99.999% of the things that people tell each other anonymously every day in heared online conversations.

But if you do not know that person? You cannot even form a plausible image of who it is. There are plenty of people on this website who routinely post extremely cringy stuff, and you feel that the character behind it is overall cringy - yet were you to meet that person, say, at a shopping mall, you would never guess that it is the same person as the one the caricature of which you conjured up in your mind based on extremely limited data.

This is why I choose to not take this stuff seriously. I do not want to judge anyone by their worst elements that they put on display on the Internet under the shroud of anonymity. And for myself, every time I post something now, I ask myself, "What would the people dearest to me think of me if they heard me say it in person?" Keeps my darker side at bay.

ZeusAres42

@JulesKorngold

FYI, one great way to do this is by formal debating or using the premium function.