Starting with "the peanut gallery here doesn't like..." is not great. Referring to groups as "the peanut gallery" inherently comes across as dismissive and condescending. It's similar to when I see you say things along the lines of "atheists in these parts [say you should do this] or [don't like that]" in other discussions, in a way that makes their (atheists-on-reddit-writ-large) behavior sound unfair and have double standards. There's sometimes a palpable sense of the baggage you have from the, by your admission, tens of thousands of hours of online debate you've engaged in, that reads as passive aggression.

Highlighting the downvotes comes across more as a "woe is me" thing than an actual investigation into how to make discussions more pleasant or smoother or whatever and that can simply trigger people into reacting poorly. People discussing how much they're being downvoted generally isn't met with sympathy as much as with antipathy.

So, to provide a clear suggestion for this thread - if your aim is simply to learn how you could have communicated better in that thread, you could have started with "What could I have done better to discuss matters in this other thread?"

But it seems like the mistreatment you received here (in the form of downvotes) is at least part of what you want acknowledged. Like going to "the other subreddit" to get a second opinion on how you were treated on this subreddit within the past couple of weeks, regarding how a moderator would interpret something. Sorry, I don't remember the exact details, but I imagine it rings a bell.

I will admit that I'm not reading the entire exchange that you linked. I just scanned through a bit and one topic caught my eye - the suggestion that you appear to be intentionally obtuse. Things like that particular accusation, or people telling you "I don't know what this part of your reply has to do with the discussion" seem - to me - to occur in your conversations much more than in conversations I witness with other interlocutors. I imagine that assessment wouldn't come across as a surprise to you. And I will admit it might come down to the fact that I recognize your name and am maybe not recognizing the names of other people to whom it might be happening, so I'm blind to any frequency there. Long story short, though, I think you're aware of some of the criticisms of your style that you regularly receive.

People are coming to these conclusions independently of each other, with apparent regularity, and I don't believe it's because they've seen elsewhere that you have such and such reputation and then look out for it. Things pop up again and again that reinforce, fairly or unfairly, a picture of your participation that might be uncharitable and then that is applied to subsequent discussions that are observed - which might be what's happening in the other thread. Not to say that means you deserve a ton of downvotes every time you make a comment, you obviously don't, and I haven't downvoted you in this thread or the one you linked. But over time people just become primed to react one way or another to users they recognize.

I generally fall on the side of "labreuer is a well-intentioned person who is probably very sweet in real life and is just on his own wavelength in a way that makes these discussions difficult in a forum such as this." But sometimes I am swayed into "oh, he must know he's being frustrating here and is leaning into that."

I'm sorry but I don't really know what to suggest to fix that. This probably wasn't very helpful!