Antagonistic types of questions are e.g. trying to "catch you in a lie", assume the other party is malicious, or generally any type of power play that fails to recognize nobody is obligated to answer.
You dont even have to have an opposing view. You get dogpiled on if you are neutral and just representing what the other side is saying. or debunking activist bunk a member may be spreading.
dogpile: to direct a barrage of criticism, insults, etc. at (someone or something)
First, insults are rare on Metabunk.
Second, criticism comes with evidence.
Third, in debunking the sides are not created equally: typically, one side aligns with reality and established science, and the other doesn't.
What Metabunk is good at is adressing issues with facts.
Conspiracy theorists, more often than not, will "dogpile" you with a heap of unrelated factoids (cf. "gish gallop"), and shift the goalposts when things are not going their way. The "Metabunk community" tends not to do that.
So you sound like you're mega confident that you've somehow — with 100% certainty1 — divined what my actual motivations are for asking the questions I ask.
The key mistake you're making is to assume that this platform is just for communication—if that were true, we'd be no more than the indoctrinated scientismics the CTists would have us be. But in fact there's often a phase of discovery where it's important to formulate and share thoughts, to find out what it is that's there to communicate it. How to present it to others is a step that must come later.
From this paragraph, it's clear I see two purposes to Metabunk:
Communication
Discovery
So the focus can either be on communicating (explaining) some established knowledge to people new to the field, or on discovering new knowledge.
For example, Mick's Gimbal explainer (which we're discussing in this thread) is made for communication, it's accessible to a wide range of people. The thread where Mick and others work out the correct maths for the simulator Mick uses in that video is very technical, I wouldn't expect many people to be able to follow or contribute to the discussion—but that's ok, because its main purpose was discovery. (Most discussions here have some overlap of these aspects, it's rarely as clear-cut as in this example.)
I don't see any evidence in either of your criticisms of my comment. You ignoring the main definition of "dog pile" is not evidence that supports your criticism. You "teaching me" about what dogpile [allegedly] means is insulting.
i dont want to dislike your whole comment this was included in. but i dislike this, as it is disingenuous (YOU brought the topic up), and rude. (YOU brought the topic up).
(and i clicked his link, you should just apologize for your previous accusation or tell him -if you can- that that is not the evidence you were using when you criticized him earlier in this thread. )
Nah, I think it's pretty bad form to engage someone in a discussion - to start the discussion even - and then ignore questions they ask you (for reasons savvy people will easily divine). Asking the asker to then wait however many days or weeks for a non-answer and then PM you is only adding to that.