One thing I, along with others (you know who you are), can be quite bad at is dropping disputes that arise in commentaries.
Generally one party will say something along the lines of "You clearly don't understand the difference between X and Y", and then the other party feels the need to defend their position. Often the context of the OP gets ignored at this point, which starts to get off-topic.
So, what's the right thing to do here?
- Ignoring it is difficult, because of concerns about peer opinion (not rep points)
- Arguing a point is fruitless, because there are often philosophical differences of opinion
- Deleting comments once you realise it's fruitless would often lead to a trail of @A comments, which is both meaningless, and implies 'A' has somehow 'lost', or been censored.
- Stating "This isn't going anywhere, let's drop it" seems a bit snippy
Arguably, it might be worth opening a new question to debate the point, but it is invariably debate, philosophy, and therefore not Stack Overflow fodder.
UPDATE For those of us using our real names, there's also the added complication of search-engines finding us at interview time.
EDIT On a lighter note, and somewhat admitting I might take this too seriously....