Comment by wwweston
5 years ago
> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.
Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they're posting that offend people all the time. That's quite an achievement.