I am not strawmanning sunwillrise’s position, I am making an additional related point.
You wrote:
if someone is fully on the side of “I’m not actually trying to have a conversation with the author, I’m writing for the rest of the readership”
Whom does this describe? Who has expressed any such sentiment?
The implicature of your comment was that the quoted bit was a restatement of the point to which you were responding. You were absolutely strawmanning sunwillrise’s position.
I do not believe it is the only reason, but it is a common reason, and it is costly for people to repeatedly come to believe (based on the common social cues) that it is what is happening and engage on those terms
If someone mistakenly believes that their interlocutor in a public conversation on a public discussion forum is just trying to convince them, personally, to change their minds, then this is almost certainly an error on their part. As a moderator of said forum, it would behoove you to spread awareness of the fact that such is not the default or the usual motivation for people to have public conversations on said public forum.
only to find out later that it is not and the person is substantially motivated by wanting to make them look bad.
This, too, is a strawman: “substantially motivated by wanting to make them look bad” is a tendentious description, and is certainly not one which most people would endorse, as applied to their own contributions to such conversations.
You wrote:
Whom does this describe? Who has expressed any such sentiment?
The implicature of your comment was that the quoted bit was a restatement of the point to which you were responding. You were absolutely strawmanning sunwillrise’s position.
If someone mistakenly believes that their interlocutor in a public conversation on a public discussion forum is just trying to convince them, personally, to change their minds, then this is almost certainly an error on their part. As a moderator of said forum, it would behoove you to spread awareness of the fact that such is not the default or the usual motivation for people to have public conversations on said public forum.
This, too, is a strawman: “substantially motivated by wanting to make them look bad” is a tendentious description, and is certainly not one which most people would endorse, as applied to their own contributions to such conversations.