Public comments on the internet do not work like a private conversation. Not everything is equally public just because you say it on the internet and it took me a long time to sort out such ideas.
One thing I did for a long time was reply to anyone who replied to me and it went bad places. It made me look very fighty and overly emotional and overly aggressive when the reality was I was just kind of naive and tended to feel that replying to people who spoke to me was just good manners and that's not how that came across. It created a lot of problems for me at one time.
It took me a long time to learn to let my words stand on their own in a large forum and trust that readers could make their own judgment about things and that written comments aren't like spoken discussions. It sort of doesn't matter who gets in the last word, for example. ALL the words are still there, no matter what order they were said in.
I don't know how to properly educate naive people, especially if they happen to be women and it happens to be a thing happening as part of a larger pattern of gendered issues that skew a certain way because of public versus private savvy (plus reputation, etc) tending to divide up along gendered lines.
But I think that's a more useful way to try to parse such things and try to find a path forward on best practices.
One thing I did for a long time was reply to anyone who replied to me and it went bad places. It made me look very fighty and overly emotional and overly aggressive when the reality was I was just kind of naive and tended to feel that replying to people who spoke to me was just good manners and that's not how that came across. It created a lot of problems for me at one time.
It took me a long time to learn to let my words stand on their own in a large forum and trust that readers could make their own judgment about things and that written comments aren't like spoken discussions. It sort of doesn't matter who gets in the last word, for example. ALL the words are still there, no matter what order they were said in.
I don't know how to properly educate naive people, especially if they happen to be women and it happens to be a thing happening as part of a larger pattern of gendered issues that skew a certain way because of public versus private savvy (plus reputation, etc) tending to divide up along gendered lines.
But I think that's a more useful way to try to parse such things and try to find a path forward on best practices.