I've seen a lot of people on here be teased for difficulty expressing themselves. Either people complain "you're using big person words to describe mundane things" when they're aiming for precision or "woah, we don't need that damn wall of text" when they're aiming for clarity. It's like people just want to complain.

Asking both questions here. Please don't be too political here, it's a timeless issue and that's the angle I'm asking from.

Especially in an age which no longer is lenient towards it (not that any era did; I'm sure the most ancient of knights did not wish to fall for it), it always surprises me how dogmatically people treat their intuition, as in there are people who will say "that's definitely a guy" or "that's definitely a girl" even though a trip down Google lane will show how easy it is to have "definitely a guy" vibes as a girl or "definitely a girl" vibes as a guy.

My voice over the phone is ambiguous and I was calling customer service for a sport company one day, and half-way through the call, they held their hand on the part of the phone they speak in (poorly, which is why I still heard them) to refer to the "ma'am" on the other side (me), and quick-thinking me imitated the old man from the demonic furby clip saying "I'm a sir", to everyone's laughter. I'm only humorous when it's adequate to get the message across.

I'm not often misgendered by my looks, the last time that happened I was in school wearing pink and a teacher thought I was a girl. And I think I've only misgendered someone once for the same reason.

I thought to ask this seeing people really hammer into people about what gender a friend of mine must be even though it's not the friend's gender. Like, take this picture of the friend for example, what gender comes to your mind looking at that (you can count that as a side question and a "second opinion" question to an earlier one)? What made you say this with certainty?

Suppose someone hired a private detective to gather as much personal information as they possibly could on an individual, with the sole purpose of getting back at the individual by having everything about them publicly known.

There are, one would point out, rules against "some" of this in certain public spaces. Mentioned someone's address on Live TV? Boom, you're gonna get the cops. Mentioned on Reddit that a certain individual is the alt of another individual? You're gonna get a strike. However, it appears this kind of thing differs between contexts. For example, one public space might consider using someone's actual name to be TMI and discipline against that but not consider it oversharing to mention their hometown, while another might be the reverse, considering revealing their hometown to be overdoing it with identifying them while using their name is fine.

I have begun thinking of this question because someone I know is in the exact situation with the whole private investigator thing. Ironically, the one who hired the private investigator (who we'll call Person A) mentions she calls it inappropriate that she (the one the private investigator was sent to harass, we'll call her Person B) isn't afraid to refer to Person A and her family members without nominal restraint when in a broadcasted setting, but doesn't see it as the same kind of red flag to share Person B's school photos, places of residence, aliases (though some have been falsely attributed to her), and medical conditions (though for those she shares them to deny they exist). Person B says Person A has shared that info before in the form of Person A's own aliases which make reference to that info which was "as obvious as Lex Luthor owning LexCorp". Meanwhile, Person B says the same thing about Person A and the medical conditions and the media content starring her while saying of her places of residence that it's only wrong if Person A ever planned to do anything with that information, as well as saying her findings about Person B's supposed aliases publicly but not providing proofs because Person A thinks the proofs would be oversharing, instead encouraging anyone to do such an investigation on their own if they want proofs, this encouragement which Person A doesn't consider oversharing.

You can consider that a footnote, but that's what inspired me to think of asking. Suppose, then, you were to write a definition of unruly reference to personal details versus fair game references to personal details, and this definition had to be one where, if you acted within it, it's always considered oversharing/overreferencing, while if you acted outside of it, you are never considered referentially guilty, and this definition had to be applicable across anything and everything in existence considered to fall under the definition of a public space/venue/utility. What would your definition be?

This post was inspired by a dream misadventure I had last night where I was just minding my own business getting gophers out of the rice field, then suddenly on the intercom/announcements (which I did not expect to have in my dream, since I was outside, not in a building), a voice said "attention, this is a representative of the fediverse speaking... going into effect today, dreamland itself, err, everyone's dreams, are now a part of the fediverse; that is all, happy floating on cloud nine" and then suddenly a bunch of Stalingrad ninjas popped out of nowhere and ambushed me (yeah, how would you react if that's the case). So I guess I'm not even safe from everyone in my sleep.

I think there should be some incentive for that, like make those kinds of comments a spotlight or something. Maybe make a community called "late replies" that showcases the best such replies, or have a rule saying they grant free karma (in Reddit's case).