arguing with ghosts

so ive taken up the old hobby of arguing with nerds on the internet about dnd, this time on tiktok

i havent been doing this for a while and tiktok is a terrible channel for it:
-comments on tiktok have a strict character limit, so you cant really say anything in one comment
-your comments and comments of the person youre talking to sort of get jumbled up into a bag of comments in a random order so you cant read it back in a linear way
-tiktok has a strict hierarchy where posts are bigger and more than comments
-but then someone can and will lift your comment out of its bag and context to become the subject of a new post, shown first to the people that will want to agree with that creator

on top of all the usual problems (nobodys ever arguing about what youre arguing about, nobody argues in good faith, nobody ever retracts from their position and everybody always doubles down on their position, nobody has any investment in agreeing, the idea that you would disagree about something is treated as extremely suspect, and various somethings about women)

 

so my modus operandi is this:

ill be scrolling on my for-you-page (this is the basic way of interacting with tiktok)
ill see a dnd post that is wrong somehow
or alternatively (Danger Mode) ill see a post that is elevating a comment from their replies, where that comment is something i agree with, and theyll give a bad faith read and sneering reply to that comment
ill make a comment on that video affirming my contrary position

ill wait for their inevitable reply (or ill end up talking to some proximate commenter in a way that makes everything worse, then ill wait for their reply)

ill see if they back down or make some concession (this never happens)

then failing that i block them

here are some positions ive tried to hold, recently:
-that a person who plays by all the rules can still understand and care about stories
-that dungeons and dragons’ player culture is not something that comes basically from critical role
-that its important to uphold the principle of charity in this sort of argument (ie assume that the other person knows what they mean, and means what they say)
-my preference for affirmative posts where you talk about a goofy fun thing you like, rather than negative posts where you make up a guy to disagree with

i dont think these are terribly controversial opinions that i hold, (i do have much more controversial opinions, dnd has this fractal crystalline quality where you can argue about each thing, at multiple scales, with arguments at different scales acting as proxies for one another, but these are not those, like these are mild positions)

anyway im immediately shifted into proxy arguments about
-how im defending people who post negative things in replies
-how im policing the tone of what this creator can post about, or the tone of how they say what they say
-whether such a demand can be made of someone whos so female-presenting or young (as applicable)
-who am i to say this, and why should i care? 

at which point (sort of 3 replies in, with no common ground found) i generally have to block the person, at which point the whole exercise is moot, like i shouldve just blocked them to start with, but i wanted to give em a chance, i dont want to have to block each dnd person on tiktok one by one, as soon as they say something i disagree with.

but once i get to this point, where there can be no argument, because theyre blocked, theres no way to talk to them anymore, im still arguing about it in my head all day, like theres really no way out. i could kill tiktok i guess. 

i dont really remember if things were this bad on google+, i may just be viewing it with nostalgia glasses. it was pretty bad i guess. i feel like i used to argue about a better class of thing, to a more satisfying end, where everyone agreed as equals to go forward into a shinier age where some interesting middle ground could exist. i clearly do want some space online where i can argue with nerds about dnd. maybe there will be one in the future. or maybe i’m on some track where im going to become the joker or something. i’ll keep you posted