To paraphrase adamzerner...

My impression is that the expected cost of using this technique online - the probability of it backfiring multiplied by the average cost in the case that it does - is low.

While most of my communication experience is from my past role as a moderator of a youth-dominated engineering forum, and so is somewhat unusual, I believe that the expected value is in fact highly positive.

I think this is mostly because: * It's a pretty cheap technique to implement - you can simply paraphrase the person you are responding to, rather than directly quoting. (As I did in this post)

• In the case that you, in good faith, misunderstand the other member, they are going to have to re-explain their position anyways; it is far better to catch this early on, before anyone gets frustrated and before any more time is wasted.

Same function and justification as checksums, I suppose...

On the other hand, if you are only 50% sure what the other person meant, I found it was better to simply let them know that they were obscure.