Discussing politics and other contentious sunjects online feels to me like it’s counterproductive these days and even though I try not to get suckered in, I often can’t help myself. Usually though I just end up feeling frustrated and sometimes angry at the other person either missing my points or refusing to accept them.
Thinking back to conversations I’ve had here and previously on Reddit, not only can I not remember an example of me “winning” the discussion and the other person changing their mind or conceding the point, I also cannot think of a time where my mind was changed either.
So have you ever begun a discussion online with someone with a different view point to yours and either you, or they, changed the others mind?
I bet you have if you’ve been using the internet for any substantial amount of time. It might not have been a moment of clarity where you can say that moment that your mind has changed, but you’ve almost certainly been shifted one way or another over time on different topics. That’s normally how it works. We don’t usually suddenly change our minds. We change a few pieces of our opinion, or decrease our certainty of a specific thing. Eventually that leads to larger changes, but rarely all at once.