#assumptions ask

Some of what you see can probably be attributed to things like this, other parts are more setting-specific. Also: I'm not the youngest or newest person on Tumblr. Demonstrating kindness and patience is easier for people who have had more opportunities to practise, including specifically in the Tumblr setting.

I was diagnosed autistic before starting school, at a time when written information about autism was limited (and often assumed a special-school-to-institution pathway, which my diagnostician said would be a terrible idea in my case). Thus, for most of my childhood, I was in a situation where nobody fully understood me, including myself. A lot of time got spent explaining things I regarded as obvious to well-meaning but misunderstanding people.

(It still happens today. Part of that is because of my job; an IT phone technician who doesn't get a customer who doesn't understand what they're saying at least once per day probably isn't taking enough calls. Also, I'm partway through degree #2 and if pushing the boundaries of understanding enough, controlled mutual misunderstanding becomes part of the learning process. Also, being autistic in a neurotypical world lends opportunities for everyone to misunderstand each other). I think everyone starts life meaning to be, then progresses to meaning to be kind. However, one has to learn how to be kind in a way that other people can appreciate, otherwise the best one can hope for is to come across as random and strange (because they are being, but don't know how to express the being they actually are in a form they can understand). My primary school was good at teaching how to be kind in a structured way, which meant most of my class ended up generally choosing a mutually understood form of kindness by the time we were 11. The one person who didn't learn that set off a fire alarm (when there was no fire) at age 10 and got expelled.

It's hard to hold people not knowing stuff against them if it is established early on that nobody could have taught them otherwise.

Also, it became apparent early on that if I wanted to have grace extended to me for not knowing that (for example) one is meant to check before giving a full answer to "How are you?", it paid to extend the same grace to people who don't understand that an unseen and unwarned pat on the back is painful for me. (People don't do that as much on Twitter, which more than once reminded me of secondary school and the deliberate misunderstanding bullies did there).

The way I got into F1 social media is also a factor in my personality and how it is conveyed on Tumblr.

It was 2003, I started on a forum, and the one I started on (Home of F1) had a particularly argumentative (and blunt) forum member who would argue about anything. If that forum member was writing here, I think half of F1blr would have blocked them. However, I quickly discovered that if one knew one's position well and could provide evidence for that position (something I'd learned to do in ethics class), that forum member would be impressed instead of argumentative.