My understanding is that it’s not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it’s more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I’d expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There’s also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.
You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it’s own costs, which aren’t always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won’t be judged by the usual standards—if you seem “normal”, you get judged by “normal” standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include “if you don’t push back, you’ve lost the interaction”.
edit:
I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this
My understanding is that it’s not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it’s more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I’d expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There’s also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.
You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it’s own costs, which aren’t always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won’t be judged by the usual standards—if you seem “normal”, you get judged by “normal” standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include “if you don’t push back, you’ve lost the interaction”.
edit:
I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this