Stackers and Read-onlies,
If you wish to only contribute your own opinions, skip over this introduction, because it'll include hints of my own opinions, and these might influence yours.
I got a response last week from Solomonsatoshi that triggered a strong reaction from me; the details aren't quite important right now, beyond the fact that the topic was personal identification with ideologies, and naturally, personal conversations sometimes win strong emotional responses, even though the words used might have been otherwise individually harmless.
A few showers later, I was reminded spontaneously of that ... well, let's call it an avoided argument; rather than typing up a storm, pasting copy and wasting coins; we're probably gonna be quietly tolerating each other without engaging any further. I was reminded of my grandfather1, who obstinately treated any conversation as though it were some motion before parliament. You'd probably all have loved his communications, although he might have had a difficult time figuring out the website before beginning to raising bars where nobody had complained they were too low.
I was most bothered by the implicit expectation that all communications must be reasoned debate2; surely there's some usable region between the extremes of twitter noise and bitcoin blocks, where people can still exchange ideas fruitfully, without some requirement that brainrot get labelled #shitpost and paragraphs longer than one sentence have markdown subheadings keeping the audience engaged? It's been argued occasionally that there are only two global maxima of distributed network design, when defending Nakamoto Consensus against Distributed Ledger Technology and various other local maxima that aren't quite Star Topology, although if all the network is enabling is conversations between people, I don't see why the optimisation must be taken to an extreme where only two poles survive.
Anyway, I'm not worried yet about the remarkably rapid muting that most regulars appear to have performed. It's nice to have room for thinking without dozens of nanozaps influencing my comments each time I review notifications.
Footnotes
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who stuck in his ways persistently to the very end, and these ways included behaviors like opening each letter with "Dear Adlai,", or having intense drawn-out personal conversations with pretty much any interlocutor who happened to distract him from the train's scenery. As a foolish youth, I considered my grandfather's behaviors quaint, and simply a symptom of his obsolesence and the seeming inevitability of his death preceeding mine; however, over time, I realised that the opposite contrast was equally sad: the "big city life", where blocking someone's lane is an offense, and slowing you both down by apologising is a lame waste of words. ↩