Yeah I'll be honest a lot of what you said didn't occur to me at all writing that last comment, perhaps because I was so hung up on what my writing looked like :P AFK people engage in lots of different kinds of discussions, small talk, deep conversations, random stupid riffing. You get different communities online that are biased towards different kinds of communicating but I think you need to be exposed to a variety of them to really get a good idea of someone's personality. That said, looking at peoples' comments it's pretty easy to see who puts thought into their contributions and who doesn't. Positive signs would be things like including relevant hyperlinks, backing up opinions while negative signs would be things like using memes as stock responses, pedantry. I'm sure a list of them exists somewhere. So it could be that those superficial indicators have more impact on whether people think you're "painting a decent picture" of yourself online. I find that to be a pretty comforting thought.