If you’re being an asshole on purpose, because you like to argue, you’re riling people up recreationally. That does not describe most people here or I wouldn’t waste my time.
There’s only a few people like that on this board and they’re on my ignore list.
The first rule of this board is “don’t be a jerk” after all.
You talkin’ to me?
Aspenglow called out nonobaddog for the “LOL”, but apparently didn’t catch that the “sorry about your condition” had to be an accusation of having Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Did you pay for the 5 minute argument or the full half hour? [/hijack]
I’m not saying there’s something wrong about enjoying an argument. In fact, in my experience, people who like arguing are usually the ones who win arguments, for the same reason that people who like running are usually the ones who win races. That’s fine - it’s how the world works. The question is, are you arguing to win, or are you arguing to piss people off? The first is OK; the second makes you a troll.
How does the reader tell the difference?
“I could be arguing in my spare time.”
They can’t, what matters is if their argument comes across as being a jerk, or an asshole, though there are times that a person admits it.
There was one person here who admitted that they took contrary points they didn’t actually believe because they wanted to try to irritate people they felt were intelligent, as sort of an exercise. That person I labeled as a troll and ignored. (They haven’t posted in over two years so I suspect they’ve given up.)
Most folks aren’t that blatant though, and you have to infer from how they post, and how they react to being called out for it.
I’m sure the mods here have said that they don’t care if someone is sincere when they post, if they are indistinguishable from a troll they will be treated as one. Which is the only same way to handle it, as they can’t be mind-readers.
If it were easy, they wouldn’t be paying us the big bucks.
Colibri said something along those lines, yeah. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in this thread.
Well, if this is true it is a major sea-change from years past, as many (former) mods were on record as saying the exact opposite.
It is.
It wasn’t before: we’d always get told that just “disagreeing” with someone wasn’t enough to merit a warning/suspension/banning, no matter how odious their tactics and rhetoric were, with the implication that the troll in question would get a free ride because mods weren’t mind readers. [I then got a warning when I tried to point this out, undelicately admittedly] This changed when we got a brand new batch of mods c. 2020-2021.
Which of course involved “reframing” (strawmanning) the poster’s [@Euphonious_Polemic’s] concern by the (former) mod in question, after someone got warned for calling out a troll’s tactics in a non-Pit thread.
Note I am glad for said sea-change, as mods mollycoddled these people for far too long. Haven’t seen the above kind of dismissal by any mod in a number of years now, and very few “instigator” warnings of the above sort.
I agree 100%.
Sorry, but this is Abuse. You want Great Debates next door.
Wait, what? Am I going to be sad if I read that?
Probably. He lost his marbles after 9/11 and became a paranoid, reactionary xenophobe. But he’s hardly alone in that (see also Dennis Miller, among many other examples).
Damn you, Bin Laden!
… and Dan Simmons, of Hyperion fame.
hayden plus lily is back, this time in the disgraced President Trump pit thread, and unless racial slurs disguised as AAVE slang are OK even in the Pit, I’m expecting a banhammer soon.
In the cornfield.
His 16 posts including racial slurs removed and the 1 thread he started.