I agree with you (as I said initially) that the first is far from optimal, and in particular I agree with you that it has insulting overtones.
My intention was not to offer a maximally polite rephrasing (which depends on one’s audience anyway), but to offer some points that suggest an improvement slope. Clearly, though, I failed to do that unambiguously.
Your version is, I agree, a further improvement. In particular, it stops being a criticism of the original post at all, and becomes instead an invitation to continued conversation.
Unrelatedly: the only context I can think of where I’d interpret the bare imperative as more polite is one among friends close enough to play the “we’re close enough friends that I can be rude to you” metagame.
Or maybe one in which I’m not sure the speaker is from my culture at all (I have Chinese coworkers who often make bare imperative comments like this, for example, and I’ve learned to assume that they are being polite by their own social norms).
I agree with you (as I said initially) that the first is far from optimal, and in particular I agree with you that it has insulting overtones.
My intention was not to offer a maximally polite rephrasing (which depends on one’s audience anyway), but to offer some points that suggest an improvement slope. Clearly, though, I failed to do that unambiguously.
Your version is, I agree, a further improvement. In particular, it stops being a criticism of the original post at all, and becomes instead an invitation to continued conversation.
Unrelatedly: the only context I can think of where I’d interpret the bare imperative as more polite is one among friends close enough to play the “we’re close enough friends that I can be rude to you” metagame.
Or maybe one in which I’m not sure the speaker is from my culture at all (I have Chinese coworkers who often make bare imperative comments like this, for example, and I’ve learned to assume that they are being polite by their own social norms).