I want to comment on this in light of your stated preference for
That’s exactly what @JohnT was doing. His accusation wasn’t especially nasty, he just observed that you had appeared to misgender another poster. Now, it turns out that you and he disagree on the gender-specificity of the word “duuude”, so his comment took you by surprise. But the normal response to “you misgendered someone” is for you to say “oops” and everyone moves on.
long digression about misgendering, and how to handle it
Confession: i misgender people all the time. I have a lot of friends who have recently come out as a gender other than the one they used when i met them. And i mess up all the time, mostly when i post on a discord we all share. The usual script is
Me: “… he …”
A third party “they”
Then i go back and edit my post to change the pronoun to “they”, and then the third party deletes their post.
All quick and civil. I hope there aren’t too many hurt feelings.
On the other Discourse board i moderate, posters can edit their posts indefinitely. And we have a woman who came out a few years ago as female, whom we thought was a guy for years. Every so often someone misgenders her. As a mod, i send a DM to the poster, and ask them to fix their post. So far, they always have, generally apologizing to me for their mistake, and that’s the end of it.
On this board, where you can’t edit your post, the correct response is to post again to say "oops, sorry, i should have said “she”.
Anyway, @JohnT decided to try to quietly handle it, instead of just reporting your post. You perceived that as “taking a massive shit in your thread”, and reacted in kind. There were a lot of posts that were unpleasant and unrelated to the main topic. That’s EXACTLY the kind of misunderstanding/escalation/digression that the rules around reporting or using the pit are designed to avoid.