I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but here we are.
If you get into a disagreement with someone here or for whatever reason the person you’re messaging with asks you to disengage, just stop. I’ve been around since the dawn of online arguments and I’ve never seen a person realize the error of their ways because someone was trolling and/or being an asshole to them in the replies.
If someone asks you to stop, stop. If they block you, take a cue from Elsa and Let It Go. Don’t find alternate ways to continue engaging. I’m sure it the parting shot feels good, or you think you have the perfect reply to help them see the reality of a situation, but it isn’t so.
Please, just stop and think: AITA in this situation?
That post about disengaging got a LOT of comments. I can’t respond to them all, so doing it here:
There is pretty bright line between holding a politician or other public figure to account for bad policy decisions and harassing someone in the comments section of a website. I don’t know how this can be confusing. I don’t know everything though, so I can’t discount that I’m wrong.
There is a difference between arguing toward a resolution of a disagreement and harassing someone in the comments of a website after they’ve asked for the engagement to stop. The former is how we advance civilization, the latter is YouTube comments. I also feel quite confident that the comments section harassment hasn’t changed someone’s mind to the way of the harasser.
Yes, someone publicly announcing their are blocking you is not the best way to handle things, but that doesn’t make it acceptable to find an alternate means to continue engaging the person, rather it’s a good indication that you really should also block the person and move on with your life.
Yes, I agree that it is ridiculous that some people will post an opinion publicly and then complain that any replies they don’t like are “reply guys”.
Yes, I agree that if someone posts that the sky is blue and you reply that the sky can be gray on cloudy days and a beautiful orange during cloudy sunsets and then immediately reports your post is not appropriate.
It’s really not that hard to be civilized. I do think other social media platforms have primed many people for confrontational engagements.
@jerry Briefly: always remember that "mute conversation" is available if you just want to disengage yourself from a given conversation. You don't have to mute or block those involved!
@jerry I think the biggest problem is when the line is crossed from the topic being discussed to directly insulting the person. Unfortunately we live in a time where if you can’t soundly win an argument or discussion you go for insults. Media is telling us this is OK, politicians are doing it. It’s not OK. It’s childish and uncivil. Let’s be better.
@jerry@codinghorror I have been running a Discourse instance since right before Google+ disappeared. The tools for encouraging constructive and civilized construction work. Of course, you have to use them, but they are pretty richly functional. They do help build community, I believe.
I'm really looking forward to the ActivityPub plugin maturing to the point where Discourse integrates thoroughly into the fediverse. It's a great start so far! 🎉
@jerry@codinghorror You don't actually need my advice here, and I doubt you would deploy Discourse the same way I did (I'm using docker, not a k8s cluster) but as a survey of what pieces I put together, a thing I wrote might possibly be helpful. No obligation. But it's the kind of thing I wish existed when I got started. ☺
@jerry@codinghorror Discourse is truly excellent. It's great/easy to administer, it's well-documented, it looks good out of the box, it has good moderation tools out of the box, and it integrates with other stuff easily. Tags implementation is annoying enough to where I don't let anybody other than me create tags, but that's a small thing. I hate nearly all modern software at least some of the time, but I never hate Discourse.
@jerry@codinghorror I run a handful of Discourse community sites and the default settings are very good out of the box, and even as a self hoster it is very easy to stay up to date.
I think it’s probably the right choice for us to run for our membership and working group at #CoSocialCa
It also has good SSO support which would be lovely if we can make it work for multiple Fedi services.
@jerry@codinghorror This conversation has reminded me I'm well overdue giving it a go.
Jeff, apologies to piggy back here, but what is the best way to explore feasibility of migration, resources needed for a given number of posts/MAUs, and similar? We own our own hardware and have been on Invision since 2003. Best to just pore over the docs and read the community forum?
@tehstu@jerry fantastic! Best resource is https://meta.discourse.org -- or we can host you, there are also other hosting services too. It's all good. Any Discourse instance is a win for the web in our view.
@rysiek@jerry glad to hear it! Feedback from active admins and users is pure gold to us and always highly prioritized, so feel free to stop by https://meta.discourse.org as needed 🙇
@jerry honestly mastodon just doesn’t have that kind of atmosphere, even they few heated discussions I’ve had would be civil by any other socials standard, only been blocked by one person so far.
@jerry The desire to be right is such a strong force in human affairs that we need a word for it. Do any languages other than English have one we can borrow?
@jerry if you're one of these people who has trouble leaving without the 'last word', just say "it's clear that we aren't going to see eye to eye on this. Goodbye." and then just stop. There's no algorithm that's gonna reward you with more eyeballs for impassioned arguments here.
@jerry it takes two to engage. If you want to block a person, you can just block them without making an announcement that you're blocking them, and that is usually the end of things on that matter. Announcing publicly that you're blocking the person because they're whatever derogatory term you wish to call them is just begging the other person to continue to engage in other ways, as this amounts to public shaming of that person and actually escalates rather than de-escalates.
@jerry It’s good advice, and chimes perfectly with my almost 20 years in political forums.
It’s similar to some wisdom I received from a brilliant driving instructor: “that person who’s tailgating you, is there anything you can do from your driving seat to make them less of a dick? No. So the best thing you can do is calmly move out of their way and have them out of your life as soon as possible.”
@jerry This is great advice 99% of the time. One edge case is when you're criticizing a powerful person. If, for example, the mayor of your town is kicking homeless people out of their tents and asks you to stop criticizing them online, you should absolutely keep criticizing them. We must not outlaw speaking truth to power because power asks us to disengage.
It's so easy to reduce the person on the other side of the screen to a paticular opinion or position
We lack the usual social cues and context that predispose us to humanise our interlocutor, instead abstracting them to the 'opposition', an ideological construct that needs must be torn down...
@jerry Good advice! This reminds me of the time I was active on FidoNet. Because of the technical nature of FidoNet it would take longer, but exactly the same patterns could be seen. It’s hard to take a step back in public, but sometimes it is the only right thing to do.
@jerry Recently had an interaction with the mod of a large instance here. When I asked them to stop, they kept going, so I had to block them.
After I blocked them, they posted a link to my original toot and encouraged other to antagonize me. It is what it is, and I have seen worst, so I just went about my day. I was surprised to see that here, though, from a mod of a popular instance who has been over here since 2017!
@jerry@ChiaChatter As always there are several ways this could be viewed. However I found on previous social platforms before getting on to mastodon, that not getting involved unless someone is open to discussion which is obviously not the case in the original scenario of this thread, just leave it. I found the same to be true in real life. What does it do to have the last word really? I’ve been called weak for it but again its just my view, but walking away gives people time to calm and try to work through things. Or not as is sadly sometimes the case. I will add that I wish I adopted this back in my teens and early 20’s, however I didn’t. Again this raises another interesting point though about who we are influenced by and what we pick up from people. Now that I am older and can see the right way to act (again just my view,) I try to stay clear of such situations.
@jerry I have occasionally had discussions where someone took offense to something I said, then took offense when I tried to explain that no offense was intended. Maybe they had a chip on their shoulder; maybe I was having an incredibly clumsy communication day. It didn’t really matter. It was clear that the conversation was broken and could not be repaired. So the best thing to do was to bail out of the conversation, without further comment or parting shots.
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