If it was in a 1:1 online conversation, I agree, it would be mostly pointless. But a forum is more like a public debate (provided the audience is an audience you vaguely care about).
This effect is stronger than most people think, which is why totalitarian governments, and those aspiring to get there, employ botnets and resort to shadowbanning etc.
Keep standing up for the truth, you help others overcome peer pressure!
What we got in exchange is that trolls convinced fair amount of people. They opinions were th Those who opposed them were consistently blamed.
Anyway, I think people who say dumb things on the internet suffer much more for not getting attention than being corrected.
This is true to an extent. If you're in a 500 comment thread, and the point you want to make has already been made by a few other people, there's little point in dogpiling in yourself. However, this isn't always true. If you're adding new information/perspectives, I don't see how that's "just more noise on the noise pile".
Your mileage may vary, but this has been my experience.
But anyway, debating the semantic difference between theory and experience seems to be missing the point.
I don’t mean you in particular, but sentences with “one most likely…” are rather hard to read IMO.
>I think you are 1) providing readers with a more useful angle, and 2) not giving the wrong impression to a candid reader that this take is somehow a consensus.
That sort of transparency may make the difference among a set of choices including "that's so ridiculous it's not worth replying", "that's ridiculous but maybe both parties (and other readers) might learn something from the discussion of why it's ridiculous", and "we can take this seemingly-ridiculous hypothesis somewhat seriously and determine where and how it goes wrong, and whether a more formal exploration (in the sense of 'write it up as something approaching a draft paper') might be fruitful".
Experts can learn in a good faith ELI5/ELI12/ELI25 discussion, sometimes about their own field (e.g. the expert might arrive at some personally-useful intuition while explaining some technical procedure), but more often about how to communicate more effectively with nonexperts.
More pejoratively, advancing an unusual hypothesis in a field that one does not understand, leaning on a third-party idea that one does not disclose, and treating the unusual hypothesis as requiring disproof is unlikely to be fairly described as "good faith".
(So far, so good.)
Speak for yourself please. On most forums nobody is going to praise another for their knowledge. Additionally most people are anonymous.
I love that our local celebrities, as such, are such not for battle but for their euclididation.
I'd say the primary reason to post on a forum is so that other people see it. It's funny when I get spicy somewhere and then the person tries to lecture me on "maybe I should say my point nicer so the person I'm arguing against is more likely to change their mind," as if that were the primary goal.
Too bad Reddit is an echo chamber these days where you’ll be downvoted into auto-deletion in all but the smallest subreddits.