It’s pretty common, though. You wanted the other people reading to think of you as clever, and considered that to be “worth” making the author feel a bit bad. This is what the proxy-value of karma, as implemented by the Reddit-codebase discussion engine of this site, reflects: the author can only downvote once (and even then they are discouraged from doing so, unlike with, say, a Whuffie system), but the audience can upvote numerous times.
Thinking back, I’ve had many discussions on the Internet that devolved into arguments, where, although my interlocutor was trying to convince me of something, I had given up on convincing them of anything in particular, and was instead trying to convince any third-parties reading the post that the other person was not to be trusted, and that their advice was dangerous—at the expense of making myself seem like even less trustworthy to the person I was nominally supposed to be convincing. This is what public fora do.
Thank You For Smoking has a wonderful moment along these lines (and is a thoroughly enjoyable film for other reasons).
This describes what I do on the other forum I frequent; I treat anyone politely for about 3 posts, and then if they’re still an idiot I just start tearing them apart for the amusement of myself and others. But I was surprised that I did it here (I wasn’t planning to), and even more surprised that it was so well received.
It’s pretty common, though. You wanted the other people reading to think of you as clever, and considered that to be “worth” making the author feel a bit bad. This is what the proxy-value of karma, as implemented by the Reddit-codebase discussion engine of this site, reflects: the author can only downvote once (and even then they are discouraged from doing so, unlike with, say, a Whuffie system), but the audience can upvote numerous times.
Thinking back, I’ve had many discussions on the Internet that devolved into arguments, where, although my interlocutor was trying to convince me of something, I had given up on convincing them of anything in particular, and was instead trying to convince any third-parties reading the post that the other person was not to be trusted, and that their advice was dangerous—at the expense of making myself seem like even less trustworthy to the person I was nominally supposed to be convincing. This is what public fora do.
Thank You For Smoking has a wonderful moment along these lines (and is a thoroughly enjoyable film for other reasons).
This describes what I do on the other forum I frequent; I treat anyone politely for about 3 posts, and then if they’re still an idiot I just start tearing them apart for the amusement of myself and others. But I was surprised that I did it here (I wasn’t planning to), and even more surprised that it was so well received.