I find peoples' reactions to this to not be a new phenomenon, but I do have the pandemic to thank for making me far better at identifying such personalities and not letting myself judge the person having them. In my experience it's pretty rare to find someone capable of removing emotion from an argument. Perhaps 5% of people I know are capable of this. The other 95%, given enough debate, put you in their idiot or "basically Hitler" box and cease to listen to or respect anything you say. This makes me very sad, because we've got other huge challenges needing faced as a species and I can see the same crazy nonsense we've seen with COVID happening for all of those too. Before we can begin to fix real issues facing civilisation, we're going to have to fix our ability to tolerate and debate arguments we disagree with.
One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.
One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.