So I want to return but...

The five stages of forum grief. Perfectly normal and natural, Phoenix.

More seriously though, you can only restate your position so many times in so many different ways. I often worry that the conversational structure of a forum thread is more detrimental to productive discussion than beneficial, because there's no way to tell for sure whether people are listening to you unless they provide feedback. And studies have proven that people are a lot more likely to provide feedback in online discussions when their feedback is negative. Which means you have no quantitative sense of all the readers who feel positively about your thoughts--despite the fact that web traffic stats prove that most visitors to Internet forums are overwhelmingly readers, not posters. Add this to the fact that the average poster in the midst of a conversation (that includes you, Phoenix) will often become doubly focused on feedback that disagrees with their posts, at the expense of ignoring much of the positive feedback.

I once spent three months on a rather extreme experiment on this forum, where I willed myself to do the complete opposite; only interacting with people who replied positively to my thoughts, and completely dismissing posts that were argumentative, even politely argumentative (because we all know where that leads). As expected, it didn't always lead to very productive conversations either, because A LOT OF PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET just don't know how else to interact ("Oh, so we agree on that. That's...well that's...nice. KTHXBYE"). Still, it was the most peaceful three months of interaction I ever had on these forums. And when I'm at my best, I use what I learned from that experiment to encourage a sense of balance in my conversations. Now, if only I could always be at my best.

All of what you said is true, in my experience.

But to be fair, unreserved agreement doesn't tend to lead anywhere interesting in real life, either. At best, you get into a long conversation about just how much you agree with each other, which can be cathartic, but it can also lead to the deceptively dangerous commiseration spiral.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

This statement is only true for a subset of the forum community. Removing the word "only" makes it true for the rest of the forum community.

That made me laugh out loud, Arcanaville.

I just added your name to my browser's spellchecker in case I'm ever ******* crazy enough to get into a protracted argument with you.

Oh goodness. Fine. Batdoodoo crazy enough.

Bookmarked. Looks like a good read for later.