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