> I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every co

> I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted. Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias. Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.