I am shy. No, really.

I'm one of the more shy people that you know. Most of the people who see or hear me make this claim, probably including yourself, are incredulous. That goes double for people who have spent a significant amount of time around me, but with whom I don't have a close personal relationship. This is because most of the people that I interact with on a regular basis have a strongly filtered view of me. I interact with most of you mostly in environments where one of a few mitigating factors come into play. Outside of those environments I'm the typical socially awkward and mal-adjusted loner geek, and most of the world falls into that category.

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So you say there's a better approach to communication to solve this issue?

I get this a lot. I'm engaged in a heated discussion, perhaps even an argument, on the internet. Not a pointless discussion, but one with real world consequences. The topic might be consent, or safety, or event planning and policies. Something that people have strong opinions about, even when those opinions aren't necessarily well thought out. I'll have a position in this discussion that I'm trying to promote or defend, and someone else will be contradicting, refuting, or attacking that position. At some point, the conversation will shift. One or more people will stop (if they had started) discussing the topic, and start making comments about how I communicate. I will get called counterproductive, disruptive, confrontational, etc.

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Finally, in both cases, and more in line with the (1) point that I quoted above... If you believe you have a better approach to achieving a goal that we both believe is good, you can sidestep any need to convince me otherwise by simply implementing your own approach. Alternately, you could convince someone else to implement it, someone who isn't already committed to a differnet approach. The fact that we are having this conversation tells me that either you aren't able or willing to implement your own solution, which hints at some hidden cost or requirement that you aren't considering in pushing that solution on me, or that your solution doesn't actually achieve the goals in question. If those two things weren't true, you would have already solved the problem, and I'd never have started down the path of trying to solve it myself. This response applies at every level of meta related to most such issues. It applies to actually solving the core problem. It applies to eliminating uncomfortable discussions about the problem. It applies to discussing how to eliminate uncomfortable discussions about the problem.

So, as long as you aren't willing to explain to me how my approach is net-bad, or willing to get yourself or others to implement your better approach, we're just going to continue disagreeing about the appropriateness of me using a maybe-not-optimal approach to achieving positive goals.