I will admit it, I never said you didn’t in fact. Anyway, back to @k9bfriender.
Maybe dip your toes back into less heated threads?
For what it’s worth (checks pockets, comes up empty) I’d rather you here than not @k9bfriender, but if it makes you crazy, my needs are absolutely less important than yours.
I too, much as @Whack-a-Mole mentioned, have become better at identifying threads that are bound to, or are in the process of going off the rails, and generally stay out of them.
On a related note, I also can identify threads/topics that I’m too emotionally invested in to separate myself from having my arguments attacked and having myself attacked. If they’re sufficiently structured, I can give it a go, but loose ones? Not worth it for all involved.
Being able to opt out of a thread, or a poster (even if it’s just short term) is a huge help. There have been posters that have pissed me off so much for whatever reason, that I gave them a 2 week ignore just so we could both get over each other.
So in short, you have a lot of options, not just extremes, and take plenty of time to decide yea or nay, as well as the vast realms in the middle.
This morning I skimmed thru @k9bfriender threads.
I didn’t read all posts, but a bunch.
I have to say the most beautiful one was about the death of his dog Squirrel.
Anyone who loves dogs like that should be here.
We need these kinda folks.
I know the fluffy kitty, cutesy puppy threads aren’t culturally important or politically astute.
It’s a clear sign things are right in the world when we love our animals. Those pets relieve the anxiety and calm our mental health. (I suspect there are studies to prove this).
I trust people who love their animals more than anyone else, I don’t care your education, looks, smell, political affiliation, ideas on hot button issues. If you love your dog, I love you. Period.
Today I went to a Zen talk. It was kind of an introduction/ Q&A.
Someone asked if animals are capable of becoming awakened beings. “Like, can my dog become enlightened?”
The teacher said, “Dogs are already awakened beings. Cats are children of Mara.”
Same. I mostly lurk and enjoy reading. I have never felt comfortable posting much but that’s my own issue.
I agree with the OP. That being said, I think the Dope is already still far better in this regard than most other online platforms. Reddit was, and is, 3x as toxic about the bear vs. man discussion than here.
So now that I’m rested, and have a chance to not just express sympathy, but talk about the thread in general, here’s my take on the subject. As is often the case, I’m going to agree and disagree with our OP @k9bfriender. Oh, not in the most general terms, but in conclusions I draw from a general agreement.
First, the internet community as a whole (social media in a bit) has given us options perhaps never before available (maybe to the tippy-tippy top of the wealthy like Howard Hughes) to be connected to the world while being cut off from other humans.
And this can be swell! For better and for worse, you can choose who you associate with and never have to interact with people who you dislike, are uncomfortable with, consider outright evil, etc. Getting rid of them is as easy as clicking an “X” at the upper right corner of a screen or a software feature to mute.
Dealing with humans IRL can become a major pain, because it ISN’T as easy to mute, block, or close them out. Co-workers, family members, friends (who have that one horrible obsession), what have you. And because you have to deal with them every single day in many examples, it CAN absolutely be bad for your mental and physical health. And sometimes you have to take the IRL equivalent of a block and cut someone out of your life (my step-father) because they’ve gone cray-cray.
Or sometimes you balance it, and agree verbally or non-verbally that some subjects won’t be talked about when you’re in each others presence (my FiL for example).
The issue can get more complicated when your personal social circle gives you stress, AND your internet social circle gives you stress: the cumulative effect becomes too much. People sometimes retreat from one to the other (in whichever order helps) as a coping mechanism.
And that too is fine. But… while I absolutely believe it covers a huge spectrum, humans are by and large social creatures. Most of us need the interaction, whether it be mostly supportive, or mostly adversarial, or something in between. And as the stresses build up, it can be very easy to withdraw nearly entirely as I mentioned way back at the beginning.
Which again, isn’t wrong, it’s a coping mechanism. But it can lead to the same physical and mental health issues because you’re so cut off - loneliness and depression can cause just as much harm as the constant abuse of friends and strangers.
So damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
ASIDE: again, huge spectrum of people out there, from happy hermits to people who are depressingly alone in a huge crowd of smiling friends!
Right now I’m reconnecting with a friend who has basically cut off IRL associations with almost everyone but their partner during the Trump years. They are LBGQT+ and felt threatened by the way the people around them were changing, and then COVID, and worked in tech. So they could do all their work remotely, have all their groceries and other needs delivered, and just NOT deal with people.
They reached out online to a few of us older friends a couple of weeks ago, as a deliberate choice, to have some low-stakes fun playing WoW, chatting about old times, and to re-socialize themselves a bit, before deciding if they want to challenge themselves further. And we were happy to help, and make the bar as low as possible.
Which brings me back to social media in general, and this place in particular. Social media in general is a great place in that you can look for like minded persons while protected by no one knowing who you are, so limited consequences. At the same time, it leaves you open to all sorts of attacks protected by the same anonymous features.
Places like the SDMB actually have some of the best options, because of one thing: moderation. I cannot stress this enough, because for all their flaws, all the current mods to the best of knowledge try to enforce the rules with pretty wide tolerance for our individual foibles, but still make it a safer (note I DOT NOT say safe) place with enough guardrails to prevent most accidents.
Other, well moderated places on the internet are extremely rare in my experience. Most places that are moderated at all are either zero tolerance for outliers, or so loosely moderated that they may as well not be.
So, TL;DR: If you have a need to be social at all (most people but not everyone) the SDMB is one of the best places to be on the internet. No, it’s not perfect, but between the automated options and the endless efforts of mods, it’s a far more civil place that it’s past iterations and practically UTOPIA compared to most of social media and the internet. But if you’re going to interact with your fellow humans IRL or online, yeah, there’s going to be mental and physical stress, please do so with enough caution and with an eye to your own needs.
Thanks all, sorry for making you put up with my book.
You claim this community could be better… At one point perhaps, but the folks who chronically amplify differences and twist words and those who empower them have made that seem to be a very difficult goal.
The big issue, in my opinion is that there is not much emotional resonance with honest debate of details while there is a huge emotional resonance with tribal thinking. You can be in 99% congruence with the prevailing sentiment and still be demonized by that differing 1% or how you express the other 99%. It’s almost like the words are as significant as a religious ritual and if you flub them it marks you as an other.
This is problematic when said behavior is rewarded. Look at the toxic troll hunting threads for an example. It’s almost as if the contentiousness and bickering is a desired feature to drive engagement. Get too successful at poking back at the in-group and you get the Huey or Shodan treatment–where a new rule gets you gone.
So if you want to enjoy the place, recognize it for what it is and don’t place any significant value on the opinions of those who, in the grand scheme of things, aren’t really going to impact your life.
I kindof agree with that, and am actually afraid of agreeing with it.
I love this board, you can’t get better advice anywhere, but no opinions will ever change by presenting ones point.
My goal is to be funny, and it seems I am succeeding mostly.
Seems to me that it depends on the subject, I will have to say here that as much as I dislike some other points of view that have no support, that I like to learn new things, and when going deep in a subject one can see who is more on the money by checking the facts. The focus of this board is to fight ignorance. One has to remember that leaving disagreement alone is not healthy, particularly when vaccines are the issue 
.
The point for me is that friendship is good, but many do think that real friends are the ones who are willing to tell a friend that they are doing something wrong.
FWIW the guys at Kurzgesagt (in a Nutshell) pointed recently at research that do note that a lot of social media is doing harm by allowing disinformation and bad points of view to grow. And, interestingly, one recommendation is that old fashion forums should be preferred as things like public shame, moderation and members that gain respect from others do a better job of keeping a more sensible and healthy environment.
(One item to note, your friends and immediate surroundings are a bigger issue than the internet bubbles out there)
You are trapped in a radicalising filter bubble and your view of the world becomes narrower and more extreme. But is that true?
Studies that investigated what people actually look at online or are shown by search engines, found little evidence that you are ideologically isolated. It is the exact opposite:
Online you are constantly confronted with opinions and world views that are not your own. It turns out the place where you are the most ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people.
Your real world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors are much less diverse than your online bubble. The filter bubble exists in your real life, not online.
Ok wait. Online filter bubbles have been the prevailing explanation as to why we’ve all started hating each other more over the last two decades. If that’s not the case, shouldn’t the internet open our minds and make us more empathetic with each other? Unfortunately your brain is stupid.
Human brains didn’t evolve to understand the true nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures. Our ancestors desperately needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated. That’s why social isolation or exclusion feels so horrible, because it was actually life threatening. A tribe that worked together survived, a divided tribe died.
The way communities worked for thousands of years is that, sure, you may have disliked a neighbour, but because you lived close to each other, you also rooted for the same sports club or saw them at the church. You both thought that the people from the other village were idiots. Being physically close made you familiar and created similarities that bridged the gap of different world views so you didn’t murder each other. And your world view was probably not that different in the first place because it was formed by the same local culture.
When our brains evolved, this was enough. Whoever was around, was similar to us. We liked what was similar to us – this kept us aligned enough to work together despite our differences. As humanity moved on from small tribes to towns and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nations, our brains and our communities had to adapt to more diverse sets of neighbours. We began to meet on the town square or in universities where we argued and screamed at each other – but in the grand scheme of things communities were still relatively isolated, we were still pretty similar and aligned with the people around us.
Conflict and disagreement are not a bad thing per se. Tension over how we should live can create new and wonderful things. Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving and whatever we think is normal today, will not be normal in the future. But we also need social glue to hold our societies together, because our brains don’t care about the meta level of humanity but about being safe in a tribe.
Until about 20 years ago we did something truly new, that hit our brains like a freight train: the social media internet, the digital town square.
In a nutshell: Our brains are not able to process the amount of disagreement we encounter on the social internet. The very mechanisms that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in the first place are derailed in ways we were not prepared for. Whether you want it to or not, your brain sorts people by world views and opinions, into teams. This is not simply tribalism, it goes further. Researchers have called this process social sorting. On the digital town square you encounter people that express opinions or share information that clash with your worldview. But unlike your neighbour, they don’t root for your local sports club. You are missing the local social glue your brain needs to align with them. For your brain, the disagreement between yourself and them becomes a central part of their identity. And this makes it less likely that you will seriously consider their position or opinion in the future. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to believe it uncritically.
Evolution is too slow. So we need to find models that work with what our brains are able to tolerate. One model that seemed to work well was the pre-social media internet old people might remember:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound. But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily. If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a town square that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple: go back to smaller online communities.
Really? Because I, for one, often disagree with prevailing sentiments by lots more than 1% and don’t seem to get at all demonized for it.
I’m currently disagreeing with majority viewpoints in various threads on subjects as diverse as picking up found money in the street, preference for man or bear in isolated woods encounter, and advocacy for President Biden. And I’m not getting any “demonization” vibes from anybody for any of it.
I wonder if that’s related to the fact that I generally try to start out disagreements by expressing some respectful empathy for opposing views and acknowledging the underlying bases of disagreement, rather than just by dismissively labeling my opponents “tribal thinkers” and “hive mind” and so forth? Nah, I guess that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it, huh.
I’ll disagree with most of the rest of your post, but this is good advice for everyone.
The kings of right wing drive-bys just demonstrated to be less willing to confront the evidence.
What happened many times was that the point was to be cruel to others.
I remember that Shodan in particular said once that one of the martyrs of the civil war in El Salvador deserved death as he was “Red Romero” (this could had been in the “sister” to the SDMB, the Giraffe boards) never mind that my family knew the Archbishop and his only fault was to demand that the paramilitary forces stopped killing worker leaders, teachers, other priests, etc. My family had to flee El Salvador when he was killed by the right wingers in El Salvador.
Oh, don’t worry, Shodan kept going for years in the SDMB after that. I don’t think he was very successful about changing minds.
Virtue posturing and gate-keeping is worse on twitter (X). This place has gotten calmer over time, partly due to the collapse in membership. Twitter has gotten less interesting since the change in management.
I think this characterization of left of center online discourse is accurate. Put another way, “The first thing said to someone who has just stepped off the Trump train should be, ‘Welcome’.” Too often it is not. Conservatives and right-wingers are much stronger at the recruitment stage IMHO.
Good pro-tip. Your middle game is really outstanding though: Kimstu is the master of dissecting and unraveling confused argument.
Overall I’d say that while this website can be terrible for physical health and sanity, there’s no better place on the internet for Roman dodecahedron news.
You, yourself are well spoken. You have an air of sanity and thoughtfulness.
I appreciate that about you. It clarified my thinking a number of times.
★
As for fighting ignorance, I think one of the most ignorant things on this board is the senseless filthy name calling of settled and known members(posters)
I understand the troll trashing. And sock/trock bad mouthing. To show others, to know who the troll is, at the least. I noticed one myself late Saturday. I didn’t say anything or flag it. As I figured I wasn’t the only one that saw it. (The person is still posting and people are still in the threads. I do believe they’re on the radar, now).
But, why are we devouring our own, like this?
Hey, I screw up, tell me. Tell a Mod to tell me. I’ll try to comply.
Never said I couldn’t get stupid.
I’ve gotten hard headed occasionally when something particularly affected me.
There’s a better way folks.
I just want to highlight ths comment as worthy of consideration.
I think the core of the problem being described here is that social interactions on the internet, whether on message boards or the newer “social media”, are an intrinsically unnatural phenomenon in human relations. The anonymity and absence of real-world accountability can lead to extremely toxic behaviours.
That puts those who are attacked in this feral environment in a position that can be emotionally harmful to them. It’s exacerbated by the tribalism that drives posters to be part of the in-group by joining pile-ons in the Pit. And the attacks are often led or initiated by otherwise valuable and intelligent posters who I’m sure are wonderful people IRL but who turn noxious under the cloak of anonymity.
All I can say is that the general level of discourse here is far above that of the internet in general, making this place, for all its imperfections, a real sanctuary of relative sanity in that wilderness. But we can do better.
And to @k9bfriender, I always appreciated your posts, and I hope you stick around and come back to posting here more frequently.
There was this one dude who really loved his dog, Blondi.
He ordered her murdered. Incidentally he also had Evas dog killed. (Same thing he did to human beings that he hated)
I found a name for that: the Noem-petcare Program.
Kill 'em, the cowards way out.
Not love.
I’d agree if it weren’t for the fact that the so-called cruelty doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a deliberate feature of this place due to the existence of the pit. Ironically, the pit is also probably the best place for discussion due Miller’s philosophy in moderation. But that doesn’t negate the fact that most people are not going to compartmentalize the aggression, hostility, and personal attacks that are encouraged in the pit. So when one is the target of personal attacks don’t be surprised when personal attacks are returned. And that’s the meta of this place.
I think it’s a way to generate traffic. Exploit the emotional side of people and get them engaged in battle for entertainment.
I have to go back to my very first posts on this message board. The posts were in regards to the flying of Confederate flags and how not everyone who flies one may be whatever ____-ist, ____-ic, or ____-phobe that is the insult of the day. Sure, some are but many are not. And if one wants to communicate effectively with the intent of changing minds or attitudes it may be counterproductive to lead with an attack. Of course that led to me being pitted… Lol. Which, I can guarantee was not productive.
This is remarkably hypocritical. The bit is the best place due to (deliberately) lax moderation while also being the worst because of (equally deliberately) lax moderation?
But leaving that aside, the Pit could have the personal attacks turned down, as I suggested before, if we could call out persons of proven falsity in the rest of the threads. But for reasons the board and culture have chosen long before I ever read or posted here, to consider calling someone out for blatant falsehoods, deliberate (or ignorant) dishonest, or other excessive shadings of the truth as a personal attack.
So IMHO, we’ve chosen to artificially force everyone to be more polite everywhere else, causing the Pit to be nearly inevitable.
But, and back to the OP, because even if hijacks are mostly tolerated in the Pit, if you are pitted for whatever reason, and then you come and try to make a fight of it in the Pit, yes, it’s going to increase the rancor and the impact on mental and emotional health.
But no one is forced to participate, no more than I am forced to participate in Thread Games which I’ve muted.
Same way no one is forced to go see an X-rated movie (or even R!).