If I can offer advice, give your piece if you feel it matters and then move on. One of the nice bits of HN is you can say your opinion and move on. There are no reply notifications. I definitely ended up engaging on forums way more than I should have. I quit one and used that to push myself out of commenting. Now I spend some time commenting here but don’t let myself get pulled back in to needless arguments. There’s a bunch of topics you can skip here and I generally guess at the sentiment of the comment before jumping in. There’s a few things that just end up rehashing the same arguments. Skip them and move on.
That's mostly true. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and is not very well-known, but dang maintains hnreplies.com, an email notification service for HN. Apparently only 1860 users are signed up, but it's there.
In general, I agree with your advice. Very often I get halfway through writing a comment, but delete it because I don't think it will spawn useful conversation or be appreciated, whether it's because I'm being needlessly argumentative, or the person I'm replying to is.
