I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
No, I mean that I wrote a comment with five sentences and you literally only read the first one.
For the record, I wrote that sentence in reference to the post I linked to in the body. Take this chain, for example. Or this one where someone admitted point blank to not reading a single word I wrote.
Now. It would be incredibly hypocritical of me to not respond to the rest of your comment after chewing you out for not responding to the rest of mine, so I will. I do not think it is unreasonable, if I agree with 90% of your positions but disagree with the remaining 10%, to expect not to be treated like a fully fledged enemy. I absolutely do not think that saying I'm on the same team should be sufficient to demand respect, but I do expect to be given the benefit of the doubt, and to be able have a civil discussion about why the less-drastic methods I prefer to achieve the same aims you seek are insufficient. I was not in the thread I think you are referencing.
Can I offer a little advice..? I recently started doing this myself.
If the language starts to become emotional, nope out asap. These people just want a fight, and you won't get anything else out of them.
At best they are emotionally immature and might grow out of it some day, at worst they are trolls trying to drain your energy so it can't be used elsewhere.