It doesn’t bother me at all. I made a comment, someone replied, there is no need at all to continue the discussion unless I want to.

I get this exact feeling, sometimes to the point where I’ll block an entire community. I work a lot with people, and I speak regularly in front of large groups, but I’ve never experienced the kind of aggressive comments in real life that I do online. It gets exhausting. And I know that I can block people, but it’s also hard to distinguish between people who are just having a bad day vs. someone who’s an exhausting troll or debatebro. I usually can’t tell the difference until after the struggle session, when I’m exhausted from arguing against … usually against points I didn’t even make lol

Edit: Just saw someone on a .world community who is repeatedly misgendering a trans person. I totally think “inbox fright” is valid, and the people who think it can just be ignored are not the ones who are in marginalized groups who are frequently targeted by hate. Even a good ally will get inbox fright, because these users will turn on you too, if you call them out for their bigotry.

I have the unfortunate distinction of being accustomed to people’s resentment towards me at this point. I am no less timid, but it’s routine now. However, putting myself in another’s shoes, I make clear what you fear is unlike me. There are a million ways to debate the semantics of judgment, but only characterization can stand above the rest.

Uh no lol

If I’ve posted once in a day, and it’s gone against the grain in a particularly emotive topic discussion - then yeah I can’t say I’ve not said “oh here we fucking go” when I’ve seen the little badge with a number on it that’s not 1, because that’s usually when I’ve posted a YouTube link and the bot picks it up.

In fairness, 70% of it is a valid dissenting opinion to my own and I’ve got the opportunity to learn from someone else’s view, even if I’m still not convinced.

29% of the negative comments are just fannies just picking up a point which isn’t entirely clear and then interprets it in a way that’s logically and factually disingenuous to prove some sort of point, and I can count on one hand in the last thirty years or so the number of times that I’ve rattled someone’s cage to the point where they feel the need to PM me death threats or offer physical violence - by that point I’ve already figured out that they’re either deeply hurting and it’s manifesting itself in that way, or they’re deeply unwell and it’s well outside my skillset to help.

Lemmy overall is much more open to debate than Reddit, and the downvote button is used less of a “disagree” or “fuck you” button than it was on the latter site.