Its highly topic dependent:
On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:
- Lots of people don’t want to think and didn’t think themselves into supporting what they support.
- Lots of people are dishonest about why they support/think what they do, even with themselves.
- Unless somebody is exceptionally rational, you’re not going to change their opinion in a short online argument.
So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week (“woke” most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of “you can’t win a chess game against a pigeon”. You can just walk away, sure. But if you’re going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren’t actually arguing with the person, you’re performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too… hopefully if that happens a lot he’ll take a different position (but it’ll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn’t just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I’m too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a “win”. Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they’ll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it’s like ripping a bandaid off.
But there is also no need to invoke “freedom of speech” if the things you’re saying are unpopular and many people are offended by it… unless the government is trying to stop you from expressing those things. If people are asking the bouncer to chuck somebody out of the bar, that person might as well invoke the third amendment against quartering soldiers in their house because that’s exactly as irrelevant to the situation as the first.