I tend to treat twitter as a broadcast platform and largely ignore the replies anyway - but I certainly won't discuss sexism on there. It's ... far too easy for topics like that to generate a flash mob; if you don't find "ignore it" to be an acceptable response then leaving seems fair enough - but I'd recommend to anybody on twitter to ignore any replies to controversial statements in any case.

You were right though. It seems wrong to me that you should be silenced by the tyrannical ramblings of the brain dead mob.

"I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets."

They are likely to be old ways (compared with Twitter). You've hinted already on your website, if I understood correctly, about the ideal form of communication on the web. If people want to comment on one of your articles they should write one of their own, giving themselves the time and space to construct something worth reading.

Welcome back to the same sycophantic groupthink that had cast computing as such a breath of fresh air back when you first learned to program. While the legacy middleman economy went to shit, tech matured into the hot new thing - surprise surprise, the ignorant mob has arrived (and no, they care not for Internet philosophy). We came looking for intellectual independence, they come looking for 'social'. Much easier said than done, but don't let the bastards grind you down.