I see this quite a bit on voat, and quite a bit on reddit.

People get in to conversations, and immediately one person begins trying to destroy the other person instead of having the goal to have a good conversation.

If you want to "win" a conversation, you can almost always convince yourself somehow that you have won after things get dirty enough. There is a famous historical quote from a Catholic Cardinal: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

If you have a conversation that is more than 6 lines, they will find something by which they can make you look foolish. The whole conversation becomes about avoiding the missteps that lead to a person being proven a hypocrite, or a liar, or some other form of character assassination.

If two people were actually having a good conversation, they would work together to find the highest version of their mutual understanding of the world, and build off that.

In a disingenuous conversation, a person is noting your every word, waiting for you to slip up, whereupon they will make a big fuss about it and re-center the whole argument around that misstep to make you look foolish.

I really hate seeing the latter. I wish we could figure out a way to reduce it, because it seems to have become more prevalent every year for the last 2 decades. Or at the least cordon it off to some ugly corner of the internet where trolls can fight trolls, and the rest of us can converse in peace and with good intention.

Part of the problem is younger people having easier access, more than ever. Another problem is the huge gulf between mainstream culture and internet culture, including etiquette rules. Another problem is the rise of shilling networks masquerading as humans, both political and corporate. Which is unfortunately cheaper and more effective than most other types of advertising. Because we don't yet know better as a world culture. We don't know how to control bad actors because the ability for the PR agents to directly respond publicly is an entirely new type of public relations, and it can be hard to filter those who are simply emotional or opinionated, from those who are pushing an agenda or muddying the waters of discussion.

Muddying the waters of discussion seems to be the main methodology to break up information they don't want to seem reliable. People here know this. They can't delete things, and they can't fake downvotes forever, so eventually they just try to make everyone look crazy. They want people to see the thread with the most relevant and useful information and instead of taking it in, look at the top comments and go "oh, these people are insane" and hit the back button, and mentally note never to visit the subreddit ever again. That is the primary tactic of bad actors these days, it seems. It's an infection that is spreading around the internet, and what's worse is it makes everyone think that everyone else is insane! Although the reality hasn't changed, the perception of "people in this word" becomes very warped after years of exposure to this tactic, witnessed here and there in moments of apparent insanity. You think "man, people are fucking nuts" and you stop trusting people.

Just like those who watch too much TV news get scared of their neighbors.

Just like those who listened to too much radio became fearful of their potential nazi and communist collaborator neighbors.

Just like those who read the newspapers, accepting the propaganda as public opinion. Before the term "yellow journalism" had even been conceived.

In some ways, I wonder if the new technology is just a new way to upset culture, so that we are more easily fooled.

Thoughts?