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[naath]

Why is it that anytime I see a post that someone has made of the form "thing X is a bad thing and I wish people-who-do-X would stop doing it" there are almost always responses of the form:
a)"but *I* never do X"
and
b)"but thing Y is bad too!"

as for (a) - great, continue not doing X. Unless the initial post clearly accused *you personally* of doing X then why bother commenting to say that? Do you have anything else to add?

(b) comes in two forms; sometimes it's *true* and sometimes it's *not*. But really, NOT RELEVANT. Sure, if you were having one of those lazy afternoons down the pub and letting the conversation go hither and yon my "OMG I HATE X" might well be responded to you saying "WELL I HATE Y" and then we can all be "YEAH, HATING STUFF". But if one wants to have a Serious Discussion about X and how it affects people, and why it is bad, then Talking About Y rarely helps.

These tactics (among others) are things I think come under the heading of "Derailing" that means that they take the conversation away from what was intended (travelling along it's rails). It takes a fair amount of effort to deal with these types of comments, even if one's moderation policy is "don't like, will delete"; they really do get in the way of serious discussion. It is certainly my experience that even reading with no intention of dealing with (because someone else is doing that) these types of comments really eats up valuable head space that I could be using to engage in interesting discussion (and I'm doing quite well for spare head space really).

If you want to use your corner of the internet to have other discussions about other things then you do that. It's a big internet, there's space for everyone. But increasingly I'm find that there are a lot of topics that simply can't be discussed in a public forum, because others come along and refuse to let the discussion happen; and I find that bad because, whilst of course we could all retreat to closed communities, it makes it much harder for people who are just starting to dip their toes in the water to find things. I have a great deal of respect for people who have been, and continue to be, willing to deal with moderating public discussions of sensitive subjects and kept their sanity.


(Hello Metafandom; OMG I've been metafandom'd!)

Comments

[simont]

Unless the initial post clearly accused *you personally* of doing X then why bother commenting to say that?

A lot of posts of the sort you're talking about tend to cite some sort of subset of humanity (let's keep it general and call that subset S) as the perpetrators of X. A literal reading of the post often does make it clear that what's meant by that is that all (or nearly all) people who do X are in S rather than that all people in S do X, but I think it's well documented that human brains do have trouble dealing with the subtleties of predicate logic and will tend to accidentally and unconsciously conflate A=>B with B=>A. Also, some posts of this type don't take care with their wording in this way and let slip some sort of indiscriminate "oh, <members of S> are such bastards" comment – and if they don't, it's a good bet that at least one of the commenters will. Either way, if a member of S reads the post, it's very easy for them to feel as if they are personally accused, inspiring an immediate desire to defend oneself.

Even I'm not immune to that tendency – and I am highly trained in predicate logic, and also have seen enough of these posts to know better. It's still not instinctive to look at a post like that and calmly think "that doesn't mean me"; the gut instinct is "hey, that means me! how unfair!" and it takes a conscious effort every time to read more carefully and think "oh no, actually it doesn't". It's a fundamental misfeature of the human brain, I fear. (One of the many.)

[ptc24]

I did a one-day assertiveness course about a month and a half ago. One of the words the tutor spent a while talking about was "manipulation", and she produced a list of common forms of manipulation. There was a good deal of overlap between this, and the lists of things that commonly get called derailing.

I've got a quite long post about the general topic in my head, which I should write up some time.

[liv]

Don't have time to get into a deep discussion about this because I'm leaving for the US in like 10 minutes (OMG!), but I just wanted to say, this is a really well written post and you're absolutely right about all of it. Thank you.