It might look sinister if someone drops a reply and leaves, but that alone tells you nothing. In my experience, there is always Brandolini's law at play:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
If a reply takes a lot of effort and if you suspect the other side isn't arguing in good faith, one reply already feels like a waste of time and there's no reason to go for round two.
Here's another data point:
"Online political debate isn’t inherently toxic, a new study of Reddit commenters finds. Instead, it becomes toxic because of the kind of commenters who opt in." https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/trolls-pois...
What the researchers say about disengagement also applies to these type of trolls. I mentioned persistence, it's what ultimately makes countering these users futile. Anyone who realizes that tomorrow there will be a new thread with the same narrative eventually disengages.
*) More often I see accounts posting long comments in such a short amount of time that I doubt a human was naturally engaging in an online conversation. I would be ashamed to admit how long it took me to write my two comments in this thread and then I see accounts posting much longer comments back-to-back in under two minutes.
pavel_lishin•3h ago