I’m used to having people call me stupid, and telling me that my reporting is a useless waste of time. These kinds of comments aren’t threatening, but they are discouraging. Seeking out criticism from those who disagree with me is one of the reasons I bother with comment sections at all. I want to engage with people who have ideas that are different than mine, perspectives that might improve my thinking; these sorts of exchanges are one of the great privileges of being a journalist. But often the criticism I encounter isn’t of my work, but rather of my gender, or of entire races and socioeconomic classes of people I write about.

(These kinds of comments prompt some kindness, at least: “I happened to take the time to read the comments, and I was horrified by the reactions," one reader recently emailed to say. “I read the comments and felt an overwhelming urge to write something encouraging to you,” another wrote. “Everyone was being so mean!”)

Sometimes, when a stranger tweets something sexist at me, I write a response and take a screenshot of it instead of hitting send. All the catharsis, none of the unnecessary engagement. Other times, I like to write back to comments that strike me as mean spirited—sometimes to see if a path toward civility is even possible.

A few months ago, for example, I wrote an article about my attempts to send a telegram in an age when telegrams are basically obsolete, and someone I don’t know tweeted a response to me (and my editor), indicating he didn’t like the story: “in this article a millennial shows off her gullibility/naivety as a consumer and regurgitates Wikipedia.” Now, as far as online vitriol goes, this is pretty innocuous stuff, but the accusation about Wikipedia irked me.

So I responded: “yikes!”

Here’s a screenshot of the exchange that followed:

A few minutes later, an email arrived in my inbox. The subject line: “all right, I was kind of a dick.” The message: “All right, I was kind of a dick and as penance I will discuss things with you if you want.”

So I wrote back and asked him what I wanted to know: “Did you think I would actually read your tweet?” In other words, was he trying to get me to respond—or was he venting into the Internet ether, the way you might shout at a football game?

“I was honestly really shocked when you replied, which is kind of odd now that I think about it, because that's the opposite of how I normally think about interactions online,” he wrote. “I generally am the person who reaches out to people all the time and gets responses.” This one time, he went on, “I had a question for Elon Musk, so I asked him, and he wrote back in minutes.”

“So I don't know why it didn't occur to me that of course you were going to see that and maybe respond.”

What is it, other than $14 billion, that made me so different in his eyes than Musk? I asked him: Was it my age? “Maybe? I definitely seem to find that people under 25 or so and over 45 or so seem to be a lot less critical and wary of their information sources.” (I’m 33.) Was it my gender? He didn’t respond to that one. (It wasn’t just my tweet that prompted him to talk to me about why he’d sent the initial message; he was called out by a friend who had seen the tweet. “[I was] also really embarrassed when a few seconds after my tweet he called me out on it in our irc channel.”)