Writing for people and arguing well are separate skills to programming or most other occupations. Competence in one does not imply competence in the other. I fi

Writing for people and arguing well are separate skills to programming or most other occupations. Competence in one does not imply competence in the other. I find writing a well-formed comment/argument/response to be no easier than programming. It's extremely time consuming (for me, anyway) and this naturally flags the question: why? Why bother spending time doing this? Forums with gamified points/award systems encourage people to 'win points'. These systems and their goals are not aligned with humanity, healthy debates or avoiding dogmatism. They don't necessarily preclude the desired behaviour, but they certainly don't incentivise it. By "debates about languages" do you mean comparing one programming language to another (in full or in part)? I think that sort of discussion has always been problematic -- flamebait. It's not just technology or programming or highly technical topics. It's not just the internet. See vim vs. emacs, Holden vs. Ford (cars in Australia), milk or water first (when making tea). > authors walking on egg shells and writing caveats [...] I think this is more common on the internet today, compared to many (maybe 15?) years ago. People weren't arguing better back then, its the eggshells that are new. The Star Citizen reddit user presumably appeared as an expert in that forum -- who would question them? Does the same thing happen if you make a claim about the viability of some choice in the game, which other users would be likely to have some expertise in? In my experience, disagreeing with a gamer or disputing the dogma (or "meta", perhaps) surrounding a game is a very reliable method of starting a bad argument. - Programmers are people. People have biases and egos. - It's easy to see problems in things you know a lot about and also in things you know very little about. - "The world divides into people who think there's two kinds of folk and those that don't." (a Custard song, title missing) (I didn't finish writing this but the time it is taking me is actually becoming a problem. There's a few points in there and hopefully someone finds something worthwhile.)