14 Aug 2025
------------

Thoughts: How to win an online argument

A few things happened recently that made me think about expressing my idea and
winning an argument.

I am not a very competitive person - I don't really get excited when I go into
competitive games. Online chess, fighting games in arcade centre, even simply
an online discussion thread. I don't like it, but I too hate losing. When I
feel like I lost, like when many years ago an interviewer asked me what is the
difference between VPN and HTTPS and I didn't know, or when security auditors
sent back a list of findings and questioned about them, or when some IT gurus
picked on technical details. Absolutely hate that and is one of the reason why
I will pick up something new to learn, despite the fact that they are not
always directly or even indirectly related to my job.

Quite a long time ago, I did something similar to what I do on my Gopherhole -
I started a thread in a local forum, the music board to be precise, posting
what song I last listened to and asked other members to post theirs. I was
thinking that the music board was rather empty, so may be I could do something
to make it a happier place? Not very surprising, my posts were Irish/Scottish
songs and clearly not one single replying member was into them. But that's
okay, everyone just posted what they last listened to, or simply their
favourite songs. I thought "well, since I started this I probably should take
responsiblity", so I listened to every song the other members posted. There
were pop songs, classical music, blues, rock, heavy metal, jazz, bluegrass as
well. I don't have a wide range of vocabularies to describe my feelings about
the songs, so my comments probably were not that impressive.

It went okay until someone started to post more songs, and started to expect
more from my comments. I even got quite a few songs "interpretted wrongly" -
the melodies and lyrics sounded happy enough to me but the members said that
the songs had hidden melancholy feelings...The reply that made me stopped
posting anything further was from a heavy metal music fan.

I wasn't picky so I did listen to what they posted. I heard this theory when I
was self-learning electric guitar: you need to be very skillful in playing
guitar in order to play heavy metal music. I do believe that, at least you
need to be very fluent in fretboard movements in order to cope with the speed
and express the "anger" in a musical way but not generating dissonance noise.
(yes, heavy metal typically is loud, but never dissonance unless the artist
wanted to)

That song was actually quite a good one. I enjoyed listening to it. I did my
usual, replied to the thread. Not sure if the heavy metal fan had a bad day or
what, he told me that "I don't need you to lie about listening to it and post
comments that are clearly from the Internet. I am just finding a space to post
the songs and don't you act overfamiliar". After that reply there were a few
more "interpretation errors" and the guy said "see, he just copy and paste
whatever he found on the Internet".

I was like, "what? why should I fake my comments to please some online
strangers?". But I just stopped posting.

Recently I decided to reply to a thread on Lemmy. The OP said that they would
like to stop using software hosted on GitHub because Microsoft contributed to
the bad things happening in Gaza. To me it is an illogical move because it
doesn't hurt Microsoft, it hurts the devs who hope to get more popularity for
their applications and, by any chance, attract more donations for some. If we
say winning the argument is to see what has more upvote, I won by a lot - most
of the OP's replies were in negative. So...did I win the argument? Probably.
Did I win over the OP? Not quite. I again chose to stop replying after the OP
argued that the devs have choices.

I have quite a strong feeling that the OP may be younger than me, because I
don't feel that the OP believes that some developers would be unemployed and
rely on donation for their daily fares. I could be wrong, it could be just the
OP is in a good living environment and couldn't understand some people
struggle to survive.

What I was thinking, very bad to say out loud, was "if life has not been
treating them too bad, they would never know", a.k.a. "lack of experiences in
life". I know it is very bad because I was once a bit younger, and I hated old
people just said "you will regret it in the future", that kind of experience
talks. It always reminds me about Extreme Programming, Agile Methodology, that
saying I saw somewhere I couldn't remember: "if you don't have an agile
mindset, you won't have a successfully agile project". Not the exact wordings
but the meaning is similar to this. It was like "if you don't understand, you
won't understand". Super arrogant but when I get older, I believe, or rather I
feel it more.

Then I was thinking, well if the person I am talking to doesn't have such an
experience, what I said would be wasted and there is no winning in it. The
same goes for arguing with a senior person - I won't know what they have
experienced and there is no winning in it! All in a sudden, I was thinking
why did I reply to that Lemmy thread. Was it because I wanted to show off my
noble point of view, or I just genuinely thought that I should try my best to
stop the OP from doing something "stupid". I can say that "oh it is just some
civilised discussion to find out the truth together", but I doubt there is a
single truth behind that. I don't think that it is impossible for the OP to
by any chance have motivated others in boycotting GitHub hosted software, nor
can I say the OP would end up miserably, having no suitable software to use
and became a laughingstock for others.

I remember a way to soften the mood, again couldn't remember where I saw it.
The teaching was that you should try to praise the person you are going to
argue with, be it beautiful hair style or respectable action, before saying
anything else. The person would most probably soften up and you would have a
higher chance to discuss calmly with them. Human brain may be a bit more
complicated than this, but I kept it in mind and you won't know, sometimes a
little psychological trick works.

On Financial Times, there was an article called "The lost art of admitting
what you don't know". I think that's also something, from my point of view, I
came across quite a lot in anything discussion technical. For a very long time
I noticed that we just can't fake to be knowledgeable, because an expert will
know one is bluffing within 10 minutes of their casual talks. Especially
important to me as I somehow being moved to a more saley role a few years ago.
But again the thing is, you can behave yourself but you can't tell others to
admit that they don't know the topic, not to mention you won't know if it is
you who don't know...I am constantly like, again, a comic I saw recently[1].

Such is life. I think may be this is part of "getting older" - you are just
too tired to spend time and effort doing anything, including arguing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[1] https://mastodon.world/@exocomics/114949975302662416