“Troll” is not a great term, I think: it gets overapplied to all kinds of poor behavior.
Ideal disputation behavior should include:
-Reading other posts closely.
-Reading other posts charitably (i.e., interpreting ambiguities as though they mean the most intelligent, not the least intelligent, possible interpretation)
-Asking questions to legitimately clarify. Not asking questions to trip up opponents.
-Paraphrase others’ arguments in order to be sure you understand, not in order to make them sound stupid.
-Supporting claims with facts.
-Using reliable cites. This means that you’re wiling to stand behind your cites.
-Representing cites accurately, and admitting weaknesses either in the cites themselves, or in how the cites support your own claims.
-Responding to the meat of another person’s post, not snipping it sentence-by-sentence to respond.
-Focusing on the best arguments put forward, not on low-hanging fruits by posters saying transparently outrageous/stupid things.
The board has plenty of people who post sincerely, but fail to live up to these standards in multiple ways , repeatedly, in every thread they’re in. I don’t think it’s worth calling them trolls, but it’s worth calling them out, and it’s worth having mods intervene with their poor behavior.
I agree with your list of what “ideal disputation behavior should include”. While I certainly don’t read everything that gets posted, I can’t readily think of a single active poster that consistently posts in accordance with those ideals.
People here might want to read We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. It’s a meticulous, almost day-by-day study.
The thrust of the book is how Reddit morphed from the archetypal “free speech is everything” mindset of the straight white male creators to the slow and painful realization that creating open sewers than ran down the middle of Main St. defeated the very notion of the community they desired.
The Dope can’t and definitely shouldn’t turn into Reddit. (I say this only because I’ve learned slowly and painfully over the years that to suggest looking outside the group for things to emulate will get me that accusation and be ignored.) But the problems they faced, on a much bigger scale, are analogous, including a lack of women in authority.
I wish I could hand out a list of the ways they managed change, but some of the worst problems were overcome only when they backed down after a major crisis and admitted “this couldn’t go on.”
Maybe Tuba sees this crisis as an opportunity. But change won’t happen because everyone will suddenly play nice. The sharp ends need to be cut off and a closer lid placed on the rest.
While I do not like to toot my own horn (I lack the necessary flexibility), I must point out that I have 33,126 posts and that just under 97% of those posts are “quality posts”.
That’s probably a huge minefield; if we were to do that, I’d say that we tightly restrict it to things that are based on scientific consensus and research (which both of your examples are).
Otherwise, we get into the manifesto writing business and/or codifying the board’s prevailing political positions as “givens”.
Even though we’re 80% of the way there, in that if you say something counter to them, you’re immediately derided as an evil asshole and flat-out wrong, even if you have a perfectly reasonable difference of opinion.
For example, the prevailing view is that health care is a right, not a privilege. That’s not necessarily true- it’s still open to debate, and still being debated in society at large. Just because everyone here believes it doesn’t make it a given, nor does it mean that someone should be shouted down, or worse, accused of evil, for stating an opinion counter to the status quo.
Post# 292 is not trolling. At worst, it’s a weak unsubstantiated argument. Attack that post all you want because you disagree with the opinion expressed, or believe it’s premise has already been answered earlier in the thread, and no one should reasonably object to such an attack. But there’s no apparent effort in post # 292 to cause discord for the sake of discord.
I’m not going to accuse another poster of trolling. I’d much rather go after them directly for making a pointless argument. But if I’m looking for a needlessly incendiary counterpoint after post# 276, when I believe Hurricane Ditka joined the debate, I’m finding it in post# 285. I’m not going to read the entire thread, but if the complaint is that the standard of the debate was lowered, that had already occurred.
Regarding the thread title: If I started a thread in Elections titled “Which promise of a Democratic candidate for President poses the most future risk if that candidate wins the nomination?”, then people might be able to have a decent discussion on that topic if they’re interested. Sure, there’s going to be some partisanship and personal politics and beliefs involved in the answers. The proposed thread might still break down into a bunch of petty bickering. But at least I would have tried to ask a neutral question to start the debate. On the other hand, if I titled the thread: “Which idiotic promise of a Democratic candidate for President is going to lose them the election?”, then I’m building enmity into the thread title. I’d be inviting the Democrat enthusiasts to come out negative. It’s not trolling if they accept the invitation.
I could very much get behind these and a few more. There are probably people who wouldn’t want to stick around at a board where we were all such cucks that we couldn’t even admit the obvious truth that black people are stupid–and I think we’d be better off without them.
I suspect I’m one of your offenders on this issue (which I note I have snipped, though I don’t think it’s the kind of snipping you mean.)
In defense of the technique: sometimes a post does include a number of different claims. If I want to respond to each of those claims, separating them out is to my mind, and to the way I read things, by far the clearest way to do so. Attempting to respond to a six-paragraph post making eight different claims all in one swipe results in posts that, to me, look confusing and liable to misinterpretation. And it risks then requiring six more posts to straighten out that when I said x I wasn’t referring to sentence #3, but to sentence #14.
Yeah, the snipped-response is on occasion useful. But what’s never ever useful is when two posters get in a snipped-response battle. That’s just eye-rolly, Christ Almighty, let me wear out my scroll button irritating.
Even when you think it might be useful, though, I suggest looking twice: are all the points that person is making really worthy of a response? Often I think folks snip because it lets them respond to some low-hanging fruit, some easily-refuted triviality.
IMHO, it would be so much more useful if (generic) you picked the one or two most salient points to respond to, argued those out, and then returned to the other points if atill relevant. The “hydra”, where six or seven snip/responses are themselves subdivided into 15 snip/responses just leaves to out of context snark and basically the more reasonable person cedes the floor, because it’s not fun or interesting.
I used to snip snip snip, because I learned it here. Learning not to has made debating much more enjoyable.
I think there’s one possible exception: sometimes there are a few points that you agree with, and they’re mixed in with the ones you don’t agree with. It may make sense to tease those out.
I think you have your answer, in the responses to this and related threads. ISTM that a solid majority of (the vocal elements of) this board has taken the position that they will only respectfully tolerate disagreement with them as long as you don’t cross a line of their own choosing. Would nominally like to discuss other ideologies, but only as long as they get to define those ideologies to include only elements that they don’t find offensive. And many of the positions which are so odious that they’re not worthy of discussing are accepted to one degree or another by a pretty high percentage of the public.
I don’t think this was true of the SDMB in its early years, but that’s where it is now. This is partially about society at large, but also about the changing composition of the MB, which in becoming increasingly monolithic has thereby become more intolerant. (As I’ve posted elsewhere, I also think the SD administration, in attempting to placate this attitude, has only created further demands and a greater sense of entitlement.)
I don’t see a way around this, at this point. The membership of the board is what it is. Attempting to placate the (most vocal of the) membership will exacerbate the current trend, but leaving the current membership unhappy and in some cases riled up is also a tough sell.
Keep in mind that we’re talking about things like Holocaust denial and pro-pedophilia stuff. Is it the “black people are genetically inferior to white people” that is accepted “a pretty high percentage of the public”, or something else?
Yeah, I make no bones about wanting to limit the topics of discourse. In the same way that I’m happy to go to an ice cream shop with dozens of flavors, as long as those flavors don’t include Hooks 'n Worms, or Dropsy Surprise. Refusing to indulge those flavors doesn’t mean I only want vanilla.
This might sounds like I’m trying to misrepresent you, and I apologize. I’ve made a list of opinions I think should be off-limits, and I genuinely don’t know which ones you’re referring to when you talk about how widely-held they are. If you’re not talking about that list, then it’d be helpful for you to specify which opinions you ARE talking about.
IOW, I’m genuinely asking for clarification, not trying to gotcha.
