This is true, but only in a very narrow, specific sense. Arguments don't persuade on their own, they scale with the credibility of the speaker. Speakers gain credibility and respect by:
- Giving good advice.
- Showing good judgement and making accurate predictions.
- Demonstrating that they understand various audience. constituencies, with bonus points for demonstrating that they actually care about these constituencies.
Conversely, there are numerous ways for speakers to destroy that credibility, like a history of making deceptive statements.
For most people, this means good-faith argumentation doesn't scale because they don't have the standing to make people take them seriously. But it isn't a rule of good-faith arguments as such: arguments are just constrained by social factors and by people's finely-tuned heuristics for who's worth taking seriously.
I suspect this is the main reason people are frustrated by internet debates, to the point of wanting to give up on them and just start censoring people. I make what I think is a careful, reasoned case, and in response all I hear is crickets, or trolls, or "lol lol lol lmao lol lol lol". This is because, to almost everyone reading Twitter, Hacker News, Substack, or the NYT comments, I'm just a rando.
It takes time to build respect and credibility, so keep at the good faith discussion, give people a reason to read what you're writing, and keep your relative obscurity in perspective on the way up.
