I kissed comment culture goodbye

One of the most useful advice I got (forgot the name and the link) is to never got further than two replies deep. Every time I broke that, in hindsight, it was dumb to do so.

I’m making a mental note of that.

What did you find dumb about it?

The mind loves to invent time regret in hindsight: "I should have cleaned the house instead of watching TV", "I should have spent more time with my kids instead of spending so much time at my job", things like that. Is that what you mean?

You are blessed if you have never spent half-hours of precious mental energy pissing into the wind for a back-and-forth stalemate comment thread.

I'm on the train right now, I probably spent five minutes phrasing this comment (and if it feels like five it was likely ten) meanwhile I had a book I was going to try and finish and instead I squandered the ride on Internet junk food.

So to answer your question: yes, but no.

I've certainly spend half-hours of precious mental energy writing a comment because I was having fun writing it. Like watching TV from before, perhaps cleaning the house instead would have been a better use of the time, but It is what was enjoyable in the moment, and sometimes you can allow yourself to have some fun doing arbitrary things. I don't really see that as being dumb, but to each their own, I suppose.

This is probably correct the instant you get a whiff of bad faith or differing fundamental principles that you aren't going to be able to change, and if you do try, it'll devolve into an argument, but I've been involved in significantly longer threads that were just people asking for advice who had a lot of questions that weren't easily answerable with a google search, as well as deeper discussions that were genuinely made in good faith and made me question some of my assumptions. The latter is quite rare, but they certainly are a thing.

"A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation."

-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"

I guess it depends on what you're there to do. Sometimes I want feedback on a thought that's hyperspecific.

I could wander around town and strike up conversations with strangers and years would pass before I found somebody with the specific set of interests. But there in the depths I can find somebody else who is actually looking to talk about the same niche thing.

I don't know if friends is the right word, I only rarely meet them again later. But for a brief time we were a some kind of partner.