I noticed I had it less when working in the office in the Bay Area where it was more possible to engage in these kinds of discussions more frequently in person.
I suspect it’s just hard to get that kind of group together in the world outside of weird circumstances so it’s easier to find it online.
The thought of feeling a compulsion to participate in a lot of HN comment threads is very hard for me to imagine. My general reflexive feeling towards commenting is “waste of my time”. Particularly if there’s the risk to end up in some heated argument. Those are the worst.
Yeah; that's why I blocked twitter on my desktop and deleted the app and saved passwords on my phone.
Fortunately, HN doesn't seem to face those with anything like the same frequency, and flagged sub-threads seem to get snipped out of comment history at least by default, so I find here to be a good place for discussion.