Tell HN: I'm scared of sharing my opinion online

Yeah I’m not really sure what OP is asking.

Are other people not allowed to respond negatively? Is a down vote or a disagreement comment and response equivalent so scary?

I'm struggling to get past OP's central conceit here: they want to share views that are generally considered unreasonable, but then are surprised when others in turn may behave in an unreasonable way towards them. It really seems like two peas in the same pod. (Worth noting we are getting the most positive read on OP's proposals via self-disclosure, while we assume the most negative responses via the same.)

It's also worth noting that the OP has not claimed they have suffered verbal abuse, harrassment, or threats. It's as likely that if they were speaking in person the typical response would be someone disengaging from the conversation with haste. I imagine many HN readers are very familiar with how the nature of online discourse fundamentally shifts the responses available.

The problem with that is there are some things you might be treated like a toaster fucker offline but are not that at all.

For example seeking therapy itself, or going to toastmasters being examples of what idiotic mates might laugh at you for doing.

Why share your opinions on this stuff on social media? What does it matter?

>Just to give an example, I couldnt care less about people engaging in incest and find it just an old cultural taboo. Adults are responsible enough to know about the dangers of having children and they can do whatever they want.

Incest taboos go way, way deeper than cultural hysteresis. There's at least some evidence[0] that humans are biologically programmed to find people they grew up with dramatically unsexy. The people who are angrily shouting at you and calling you disgusting are probably reacting on that same effect.

There's also the tendency of people to publicly denounce their fetishes. Think Christian priests loudly condemning two consenting men for kissing while raping the choir boys in private. Or how 4chan's politics board stuck the word "cuck" on absolutely everything because they wanted to apply porn logic to race relations. I'm not saying every one of those Redditors has an incest fetish, but it's likely that at least some of them do.

That being said... your opinion isn't that fringe? Like, there's a huge gulf from "I don't care about incest" to "dressing as Hitler for Halloween". For me, the former is an "Agree to disagree" thing, while the latter is an "oh my god we need to isolate this person from society before they get power and hurt people" thing. And Reddit is notorious for having really shitty takes and ganging up on people[1]. On the other hand, you're paraphrasing your opinion heavily and it's entirely possible that you've just given yourself the luxury of your own point of view. Like, I'm finding it difficult to believe that you merely had a "meh" opinion on this subject.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

[1] For those who want to compare, Twitter's takes are usually less shitty but they gang up on people way more often. It's the difference between a scorpion and a wasps' nest.