(You can skip to the last paragraph and ignore the rambling).
Sometimes I feel I want to report a post, but don’t because I’m not sure it warrants it. But then I think - if this poster’s comments have made me think “why do I post here?” then perhaps it is of interest to the moderators.
But I don’t want to be a bother.
Something I find very common here is disagreement articulated as a low-key insult. We might be debating in “Great Debates”, for example, and someone will say something which is fairly rude in the sense that if someone said it to you in real life, you’re gonna walk away from that person. But it’s not obvious enough to constitute a direct insult, and there are a lot of posters who are very good at skirting that line.
Phrases like “Get a clue” and “keep smoking that crack pipe” and so on aren’t in the same league as “you are a fuckwad”, obviously. But they have the same effect - in fact, I’d argue they have more effect, since the latter can just be ignored as profanity. They attack the poster, not the argument, and they don’t foster debate - they encourage retaliation and escalation. I’ve seen many threads go off-track like that.
Sure, one answer is to just put the person on ignore. But that doesn’t work so well on this board, because it doesn’t use the vBulletin ignore mod that actually hides the post completely - it still tells you its there. And there aren’t many humans on this planet who can resist the temptation to click and see. Certainly I can’t. Yeah, I know, “your fault, you should have more willpower”. I would place large amounts of money on the fact that if everyone were forced to be honest, there’s not one person on this board who is able to consistently not click on that ignored post!
So, after all that rambling, my question is this: what level of incivility consitutes a post worth reporting, as opposed to one which, if you report it, makes you a pain in the ass? Nobody wants to be a pain in the ass, so which direction should we err towards? 'Cause I gotta say, I come closer all the time to just saying “screw it, every time I make an argument against something, some dick comes along and insults me and it seems to be OK - I’m outta here.” I’m cool with being disagreed with, debated with, argued with, but the aggression one can attract here for simply opining seems unwarranted to me.
So - what’s the boundary level? I just wanna know when to report and when to let it go.
