I am an active member on forums I’ve mentioned above and didn’t come across aggressive users like you questioning each and every opinion opposite to yours, asking if people tested all samples in a lab before they will have an opinion about anything.
That's an interesting point. Why are you member of those forums? I assume, as with most people including myself, one aspect is to learn, to ask questions, to find new solutions, to exchange experiences and to discuss different opinions.
The problem with every forum is, that many people inourdays cannot distinguish any more between opinion, belief, judgement, hypothesis, assumption, experience and fact - it is basically all the same thing. So often an opinion or assumption is stated as a fact. Which they aren't. If then someone questions that "fact" you feel attacked for your opinion - which is not the case.
Obviously opinions (and even more judgments) based on prejudices or wrong assumptions are less worth for learning than opinions or judgements based on extensive own experience and/or extensive knowledge of context. If this is all mixed up learning is barely possible, prejudices and cheap, uninformed judgements always win as they are easier to compose (and thus more frequent), more attractive (as they do need less thinking and often seem convincing on first look) and for all of those reasons get echoed more easily and more frequently, especially by newbies that have little own experience but want to actively participate and give advice. If this situation becomes the standard or dominant a forum may still be fun regarding social aspects and may still be interesting and inspring but has a very low level of competence, trustworthyness and technical value. This is basically what facebook is and what also many forums are (or have become). And often enough, this turns out to be a waste of time because of bad signal-to-noise ratio and being constantly sent in wrong and dubious directions. Often rather disinformation than information.
It is in my opinion thus in the deepest interest of a technical forum, while being integrative and friendly, to also maintain a reliable and trustworthy high standard of the technical content because this is a relevant aspect for the value of a forum, today in times of facebook, instagram etc. even more than 15 years ago. This is what distinguishes a good forum from social media and what is it's USP. Having in mind that social media is real time (no-one cares for facebook posts five years ago) while a forum is also often used as a reference and people take relevant (and in their eyes trustworthy) information from 10 year old postings and threads also makes aware of the differences and the relevance of a reliable and good standard of a forum. I've learned loads from forum archives and often enough found the hint that finally led to the correct information or simply the correct search terms on google or elsewhere. Sometimes after years of fruitless digging. But I've also often had the opposite and had to wade through tons of useless disinformation. Not desirable.
If within a forum any opinion is stated as a fact and has to be accepted as a fact (no matter on what - in extreme grotesque misinformation, prejudices etc. - it is based) there is not even discussion of different opinions possible any more and the forum is on a predictable route to irrelevantness. I've seen this often enough in forums over the last years.
If you respect, that you have an opinion and I may have a different one - but neither of those is per definition automatically "the truth" discussion mode is enabled about the reasoning and the background and learning starts. On both sides. And no matter how the discussion goes and what facts, ideas, experiences or other opinions show up: You do not need to actually change
your opinion. But sometimes you would be stupid not to. Or I. One needs to be open minded for that. If you consider new information as a threat for your personality, a different opinion than yours as as a threat as well and as an attack and any questioning of your reasoning that lead to that opinion as an attack and you assume that you are always right than this is a sure way into either trouble/conflict or irrelevance of the platform and we are back in middle age. People will toot out opinions and prejudices randomly, this may still be ok from a social perspective (and maybe very woke) but the technical value and relevance is close to zero as is the learning. More and more of the more competent people will leave and the speed to level zero increases. Nobody needs a forum like that.
Admittedly I am not always the friendliest person, but I only very rarely ride a personal attack and even if that happens this is the consequence of a longer story and escalation beforehand. If you feel personally attacked I am sorry for that but you should maybe think about why you feel that way and what set the triggers with you and what maybe with me. There are always two sides of a story.
I do consider this forum of value - this is why I do post here (and also, why I gave up on some others: because they lost their value to me). And I would like it to stay that way and to do my part to make this possible. In many cases this may be uncomfortable to others by questioning their opinions. Such is life. If you don't like that there's probably an ignore button somewhere in the settings section.