This is one of the essays I delivered to my patrons last month. If you want to support more work like this, and see it earlier, you can sign up here.

I have a dirty little secret. It’s the kind of thing that people as involved in social media as I am aren’t supposed to think, much less say. It’s certainly something that bloggers who put their opinions out there as I do aren’t supposed to think.

Here’s how it works: I publish a blog post on a subject, anything from a few hundred to a few thousand words. Or it could be a Facebook post or a series of tweets if it’s a shorter observation that I want to make sure people can see without clicking through to anything. Then people respond to tell me their opinions on the subject.

And I…I don’t care.

This isn’t universal, of course. There are many circumstances in which I do care. There are people who provide data I don’t have: studies, personal insight on something that’s confusing me, experiences I can’t share. There are people with whom I’ve been engaged in years-long discussions about the world, often even though we’ve never met. There are people who raise substantial objections over my reasoning or premises. I’m not talking about those, usually. I have my days when I don’t care much about any of that either, but those are just bad days.

Then there are the people who notice that I have put my opinion out into the world and decide that this is an invitation for them to tell me what they think. Often their comments are literally nothing more than that. “I think X.”

That’s nice. I don’t care.

I won’t tell you I never think I should care. I do. I mean, I’m putting my opinions out there, right? Plus socialization. Plus a model of online writing that says readers are my customers, consumers who must be catered to in order for me to succeed.

Still, I don’t care. Not only that, but I think most of the things that tell me I should care miss the point of social media at a minimum. I think they harm discourse by falsely democratizing it in ways that make too much of its noise and bury the signal.

This isn’t about some kind of elitism. Many of the people whose opinions I most value don’t fit in any kind of elite category. They’re not academics, though many are experts in various topics. They’re not going to be put on television. They’re not financially elite. Their English won’t make it into a newspaper or magazine without significant editing.

None of those things are why I value their comments. I value them because of what they put into them.

Words are easy if it doesn’t matter what they are. Words online are even easier because they don’t have to be yours. They can be quoted from anywhere with a simple copy and paste. Assertions are cheap and plentiful and worth about as much as we usually pay for them.

Anyone can make them. They don’t have to be original. They don’t have to be thought out or thought through. They don’t even have to be understood. They don’t have to be defensible or come from people who are willing to do the work to defend them. Someone can drop an assertion and disappear. People do that all the time.

So when I say I don’t care about some stranger laying their opinion at my feet online, I’m talking in part about what makes an opinion valuable. Is my judgment on that always going to be good? No, of course not. I know how much work I put into the opinions I share online. I know what kind of background they come of out. I have more information about my own work than will ever be apparent about someone else’s simple assertion.

Nonetheless, the odds are in my favor when I decide to shrug and move on. That decision is also supported by the social aspects of the interaction.

I’ve had, for several years now, a sideline in explaining the basics of social interactions and persuasion to people on the internet who want me to care what they think. For clarity’s sake, I’ll note that these people are almost entirely men but not quite. Sometimes they’re people who have adopted an online clan and established their reputations there. More often, however, they’re just people who are otherwise used to being treated as credible without having to prove it. Thus, men.

I won’t try to persuade you that my explanations are a great idea. They’re certainly not for everyone. I have no evidence that they’re a productive use of my time. At best, they hold the possibility of highlighting social dynamics for onlookers, because they tend to confuse and upset their targets. Mostly they entertain me.

Even so, what I tell people in these conversations isn’t wrong. Discussion is social. This is why all this is called social media. That means it matters how you behave when you try to persuade me of something.

What do you need to do?

At a minimum, you need to recognize my humanity. At its most basic, that means recognizing that my current opinion came from somewhere. It may have come out of my social connections, because that’s how most of us develop the majority of our opinions. Yes, that applies to people who think they’re very rational and data-driven too. The world is just too complex for most of us to have studied opinions on most things.

You need to recognize that I have values. They may not be your values. They still exist, and if you make no effort to understand them beyond guesses, we’re not even going to be able to have the same conversation. That may actually be okay, by the way. Sometimes people really don’t have anything useful to say to each other. But if you impute my values incorrectly, I’ll have no trouble recognizing that you’re talking to someone who isn’t me and I can comfortably tune you out.

You need to recognize that you’re asking me to do work. For that matter, you need to ask, or at least make a compelling case why you’re more entitled to my time and attention than everything else competing for them. This isn’t just a moral argument, either. It’s about your credibility. It’s about not being abusive. It’s even about consideration. Moral arguments are weighed against those, but they all matter. If you want me to examine evidence and possibly change the opinions that determine who I am and how I act, you have to persuade me that you’re not just jerking me around.

If you’re making a social argument instead (I should be of this opinion because you are), then you have to recognize that you’re asking me to trust you. You have to persuade me that you’re someone I can trust beyond even what’s required to look into a question. You have to persuade me that I should trust your knowledge. You have to persuade me that we want the same things. You have to persuade me that I can rely on you blindly. Better yet, you would have persuaded me of all this before you tried to rely on it to change my opinion. Trying to gain a person’s trust when you want something from them isn’t a compelling strategy. In fact, it’s likely to backfire.

Then there are the more basic social aspects of the interaction. You want me to listen to you? Well, I’m sure you do, but have you demonstrated that you’re listening to me? You want me to engage with your arguments. Have you engaged with mine? Are we discussing the topics I set out to discuss or only those things you think we should be talking about?

In other words, have you demonstrated that you care about me? You have in the sense that you view me as the producer of content interesting and important enough for you to read. You’ve demonstrated that the time and consideration I put into my work have value for you. But have you demonstrated that you care about me enough to do the same in return? If you haven’t, then I don’t feel the least bit apologetic about the fact that I value it less than I value my own expressed opinions. You’ve put less into talking to me than I have in talking to you, so I am utterly unsurprised that I get less out of it.

That goes for respecting my boundaries as well. Among the crew that assembled themselves to harass atheist feminists several years ago (five now), there’s a deep pique that many of them have gone into moderation on my blog because I’ve set requirements for participation here that they have failed to meet. I don’t care.

I won’t even bother to defend the nature of those boundaries, though many of them are simple things like “Acknowledge that we’ve demonstrated the claim you made isn’t true before you make more claims.” What they are doesn’t matter. They could be “Code your comments purple. Here’s the html to make that work.”

The point is that these are people who have claimed the atheist movement as theirs and try to set terms for my participation in it as a woman and a feminist, yet they’re not willing to follow a simple instruction in my space. Of course they don’t get access. Of course I don’t care what they think. Why would I? They haven’t earned it. The only times I would bother with their opinions in when they have some success in persuading other people, and by now, nearly everyone understands that trusting them is putting your own credibility at risk.

Harassers are an extreme example, of course. Violating boundaries is what they do. It’s their reason for being. But they’re hardly the only people who won’t extend basic consideration to those whom they hope to persuade. That’s endemic to human interaction. For someone with a slightly raised profile in a medium where interaction is prized and made easy, it’s a constant.

Me? I’ve mostly given up on even feeling bad about dismissing these opinions out of hand when that happens. Great, someone has an opinion. I don’t care, and I’m happy to tell them why.

Want to see more work like this? Support me on Patreon.