I've taken to increasingly absurd responses to this trope. I often explain with perverse metaphors involving their mothers. Highly recommend finding your own flavor of fun responses to this ludicrous bad faith response.
The www was very much built on sharing http links as a form of citation, no reason not to make use of such an fundamental and established function.
Imho the opposite has become a much worse issue; People casually claiming the most extraordinary things, far outside the realm of opinions, with not even an attempt to source it.
There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
Why not add a source to begin with, so others don't have to "waste" their time asking for one/looking one up?
With anything that's citing numbers, or statements by some official person or institution, that's imho a no-brainer.
Particularly as a Google search can yield wildly different results based on location, search history, and wording of the search request. So assuming everybody else can "Just Google it", is often not very useful.
> There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
You call it a risk, I call it an opportunity to fact-check if the original claim is actually true, or just one of the many headlines that take liberties for sensationalism.
It's also an opportunity to establish a "base truth" that people can agree on as a premise, to start a discussion from.
That's not a given when people from often vastly different educational, socio-economic, cultural and language backgrounds interact with each other, as it constantly happens online.
Source?
;)
Expecting others to put in the work to authenticate your claims, by sending them on wild goose chases on Google that might or might nor yield the same results you got, is a recipe for getting overwhelming amounts of disinformation.
As it's way easier to casually claim an unsourced falsehood, than it is to research a topic and debunk that falsehood with credible sources.
A better response is, "I see it different, here's a source I'm providing or story of personal experience that suggests why. Do you have other context or information that could help me understand your position?"