I used to have a Twitter account with a fake name and deliberately provocative profile picture — a digital doodle of some tech-esque bro on a starburst background with sunglasses and a "well, actually" finger in attack position (also with some sparks flying). I did not tweet; I only replied.
I attempted to use the power for "good"; I attacked the local Tory councillors of Bexley for having shitty views and a taste for dogwhistles; I poked holes in the baseless arguments of gaters and terfs; I led angry teenagers through silly arguments until they had disproven their opening claims with their subsequent waffle. My victories were worthy of song and my defeats were deep wounds that throbbed for days afterward. In one such victory I was able to draw a particularly insensitive opinion about Irish reunification from a politician, triggering a multi-day pile-on from hundreds of others; the politician went quiet for a while after that. In one such defeat I was accused of inaccurately diagnosing an argument as 'ad hominem' because a comically poor claim was attached to but independent of an insult, and with my credibility shattered there was no option but surrender.
I have no grand theory to contribute here; cleverer people than me have already defined and analysed 'Open Marketplace of Ideas' and 'Debate as Performance' and 'The Complete Absence of Logic and Reason in the Art of Persuasion'. I did it to win, and, to a lesser extent, to make sure that lurkers finding the thread later understood that the winner was making the arguments I want them to make; but that's just rationalisation; I did it to win. And I was good at it. And it made me miserable. The reader is welcome to balk at this claim, but I liken it to chess: the online debate is a turn-based, perfect information, zero-sum game, where thinking ahead is crucial and strategies are many enough to have names and complex enough to invite books carrying those names. And like chess, it requires the kind of continued and heavy concentration that stresses me out, so it's not fun for me to play it in a competition environment; I don't really know why I kept playing for so long.
I started stepping back as Twitter regressed (/devolved/died/nazified/further nazified) but full separation waited until I accidentally locked myself out of the account. I've not missed it in the years since. That, and the death of the cohost (a niche but better place), left me starved of content for a while and I went looking for places to fill the gap. Mastodon is one place, but I gave into temptation and made a Reddit account as well.
Reddit is a hellhole but it's a hellhole with decent signage; it's easier for me to evaluate ahead of time whether a particular place is safe for human consumption. Subreddits for questions about cats are fine; subreddits for "the BBC" or "software engineering" are not. The safety net mostly works, but when it fails I again find myself tempted to start a fight under the pretence of "correcting a mistruth"; I've dabbled a few times, and found it's somewhat easier than it used to be, for the most disheartening reason: the problems are more obvious and the victims more numerous than they used to be.
Privilege remains a strong factor in how well immunised one is against the everything and there's still much of it to go around, but the ante has been rising very quickly indeed in the last twenty years and it's start pricing out many of the people that would otherwise be my opponents in the online argument game. It used to be a risky strategy indeed to mention that those angry or scared people have a right to be angry or scared; it used to be fanciful to talk about government overreach or lost liberties; it used to be silly to blame billionaires for worsening lives when they give us iPhones. These claims are correct, but they weren't immediate to many of my privileged opponents, so had to either be justified (hard to do in one move) or assumed without evidence to force a stalemate. Today, half of these ignorant boys are now suffering men; the healthcare they denied to trans people is now denied to them; the jobs they denied to immigrants are now denied to them; the autonomy they denied to women is now denied to them. The only people left to play the game on the side of the wankers are those that directly grift from it.
I remember that god-awful footage from a Trump rally in 2016, where some guy provoked some other angry guys into a "debate" about whether "Trump was like Hitler". No one involved looked great (and the memes and remixes that followed milked that for all it was worth) but the anger from the protesters was real, and justified, and correct. They were right to be angry, at the rally in general and that provocateur in specific. Of course, the provocateur was later identified as YouTuber and InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and he was with InfoWars until 2025; he was also one of the January 6 insurrectionists. There is no reasonable discourse, or "traditional debate", or even the sorry excuse for "debate" I would participate in to be had with that person. There would be no substance in such a discussion; no tangible nouns; no framework of understanding to apply to or verify with the real world.
I think I have the rose-tinted glasses on when I look back on the glory days of online debate. I was a young and arrogant boy invoking trans liberation and refugee personhood as tools in a game, as casually as a chess player would invoke en passant, to put a different young and arrogant boy "in his place", and the enterprise achieved very little indeed. We would put on the costumes of our favourite online thinkers and whack our plastic social issues against each other, just as we would have ten years prior with pirate hats and swords. In the end, our heroes were either outed as grifters or doomed to be mere documentarians of an active societal collapse. To play the wanker side of the game now requires the kind of ignorance that comes primarily to those drowning in either privilege or bigotry; the only winning move is not to play.