I disagree.

Online is an excellent opportunity to teach, and even if people disagree with you or refuse to understand you, you leave behind a memento for other people to potentially eventually read, so even if it is impossible to reach the person you are specifically talking to, there can be multiplicative side effects of that conversation whose reach goes beyond anything you can imagine.

That being said, there are people that just want to say their piece or dunk on somebody and then move on and they don’t care about the side effects.

So, like everything, take it with a grain of salt, but I still think it’s worth the effort to communicate, to teach, to share when you know something or when you have a fundamental belief in something.

In my experience, people do absolutely benefit from patience and explanation. People have thanked me for being patient and clear, and I know I’ve helped comrades on their journeys. Some people already have their minds made up, sure, but then people observing are often swayed.

Online is no different than in person. Sometimes you have someone who is not receptive to new ideas, and sometimes you do. If you have someone who is receptive, who is asking actual questions, there is no reason to turn away the opportunity to educate them.

That is absolutely false…

If it helps, you can think of the “person being educated” as all the people reading the comments. If you are making coherent points and justifying what you’re saying then people will pick up on it. I think online conversation (in the aggregate) has a huge amount to do with influencing how people look at the world in modern society, probably more so than TV or newspapers or “online newspapers.” That’s not to say that any individual Lemmy poster or even Lemmy as a whole has any kind of move-the-needle influence, but on the whole, the influence from “the internet” is huge.

The person you’re arguing with will probably not be convinced (certainly not after one conversation just do a total 180 and say they agree with you now), but even on Lemmy there are dozens or hundreds of people reading your stuff and seeing whether you make sense and being impacted by it. It means the temptation to just turn it into a shit-throwing contest on both sides is important to avoid, in favor of making compelling arguments in a way that people can get behind, if you actually care about your points landing for anyone who isn’t already a convert.

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Innuendo Studios’s The Alt-Right Playbook should be absolutely mandatory reading for anyone who is planning on arguing about politics on the internet. There are some missing things simply because it came about in an earlier internet-arguing generation, but everything in there is crucially vital and still accurate, and it hits most of what in my opinion people should be thinking about if they care about convincing others of political things on the internet.

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