I appreciate the apology. I take it with the full meaning intended. So when I point out where things went off track, please take as why I was offended, not why I am offended because this is the sort of thing that behooves us all to be on top of.

I went out of my way to distance myself and my feelings from any of these proposals. For example, by advocating ads as a method of monetization I do not personally want ads. There's no "me" in any of this. Your reaction, on the other hand, was not only deeply negative but also deeply personal. You advocated against fees because you "grew up poor." You doubled down by aligning your former poverty with the experience of the majority of the country. Rhetorically, you said "I align with X and my opponent does not." In other words, your phrasing and your language used the moral authority (not the logical authority) of poverty and put me in opposition to it.

Logically, you took a number I had thrown out as an example and then misrepresented it. You then applied that number to an audience that has no verifiable or anecdotal presence in the theater of discussion. I presented a number from Reddit for the sake of argument. You took that number, used it as a concrete value, multiplied it by 12 and applied it to an extreme outlier. You made a reductio ad absurdum case against a reasonable hypothetical, which assigned me the position of unreasonability.

Finally, you took an a statement in which I was attempting to explore all options through research and dismissed them out of hand with "I don't have evidence of that, but it's a pretty strong hunch." In effect, you were arguing that all of my statements were invalid because your truthiness counted for more.

So. I put out some ideas as ideas. Your phrasing

1) Required me to defend a position I hadn't taken

2) Forced me to justify numbers I hadn't used

3) Disputed facts with emotions.

Now that we're talking reasonably, your argument boils down to "My feelings, and argument, is that what seems like a nominal fee is untenable to many people." Fine. Great. My feeling is that I said "nominal." I didn't say what "nominal" was, and I also said that the point of the exercise was to determine the alignment between "what Hubski costs" and "what people are willing to pay for it." I didn't say "$2/year is a nominal fee" I argued for the exploration of what a nominal fee is.

And here's the important take-away: I'm not telling you your position is rude and distasteful. Your position is that "nominal" may not actually be "nominal." No argument with that, not even a point I was making. I'm telling you that your presentation is rude and distasteful. It struck me as such. I'm not telling you you can't have strong feelings on an idea. I'm telling you that when your strong feelings are used to form a personal attack, however inadvertent, the recipient of that attack will feel attacked.

And it was clear I felt attacked. And when I answered your attacks with facts, you doubled down ("...which would still be a rather hefty price if it's .4% of your annual income"). it wasn't until I de-escalated things that we got back to a semi-neutral ground.

I rarely offend people by accident anymore. It still happens. When it does, there's a good chance that when I talk about it with the offended party, I discover they're accidentally offended a lot of the time. I'm occasionally offended by people who didn't intend to offend me. They usually offer up some sort of video explaining how people like to take offense at things, which they've found because they have this sort of discussion a lot. The bottom line is none of us benefit from accidentally pissing each other off and it's worth the effort to at least keep the offense in the deliberate category.

My first response was a clear-cut indicator that I'd been offended. I hoped it would lead to a discussion like this. How will you avoid offending me? How will I avoid offending you? By trying hard not to and by working to resolve it when it happens.

That's life.