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Viliam_Bur comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Maybe that's exactly what makes LW a good target. There are too many targets on the internet, and one has to pick their battles. The best place is the one where you already have support. If someone would write a similar article about a website with no feminists, no one on the website would care. Thus, wasted time.
In the same way, it is more strategic to aim this kind of criticism towards you personally than it would be e.g. towards me. Not because you are a worse person (from a feminist point of view). But because such criticism will worry you, while I would just laugh.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the "us versus them" dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the "us" side is falling apart.
EDIT: Seems like you already know this.
"A heretic is someone who shares almost all of your beliefs. Kill him." - Some card game
Upvoted for that.
In my experience, groups that want something to attack will attack groups that are generally aligned with them, rather than groups that are further away -- possibly due to the perceived threat of losing members to the similar group.
I've seen so many Communists get called Nazis by other Communist groups -- and those groups never go after people who actually call themselves Nazis.
Possible defence: criticizing specifically people and organizations of similar views can be more cost-beneficial. If you write a giant article entreating people of similar-but-not-identical position, and that article tweaks their views and massively increases their instrumental rationality, it's much better, than if you write dozens of articles addressed at your political enemies, most of whom will never read it or will never get convinced. For example, you have communist friends who are mostly correct on social issues, but are completely wrong on dialectical materialism, their organizations are polluted with death spirals, their discussions are counter-productive because of wrong usage of words, etc. It would still be more productive to direct them to LessWrong, to explain reductionism, to teach them how to use words and reasoning, how to avoid cognitive and organization failure modes, than to try to bring neo-nazis, Christian fundamentalists, New Agers or even generic consumerist Philistines up-to-date from scratch.
This of course assumes that writing a giant critical article is actually a productive way to change someone's mind. Obviously, hateful feminist anti-LW/anti-nerd rants are doing a bad job of convincing us in their points, because most of those writers have never read Dale Carnegie, let alone Cialdini. But they write angry rants anyway, because that's how they get, as Russians say it, “the feeling of fulfilled duty”, a warm fuzzy.