Would you like the laundry list of reasons or just a brief summary? In my case, and obviously I can’t speak for others, I’ve got enough problematic shit on my own plate to focus on without intentionally adding (what I consider to be) stress from a place that I just come to for enlightment. If I want to hear an overly fundamentalist attitude, I’ll pick up the phone and call my mother. Otherwise, being depressed/suicidal/agoraphobic/yadda, yadda, yadda, takes up enough of my attention and time. I don’t like increasing my overwhelming feelings by reading stuff that would only piss me off or is pointless to persue.
Certainly, your mileage (and ignore list) may very.
Oh, and I meant to add that I don’t expect you or anyone else to know that kind of indepth history about posters. However, I think it should suffice to say that sometimes the reasons that people choose to do certain things are due to circumstances that haven’t been considered and aren’t necessarily surface or shallow things. Jus’ sayin’.
Okay, I get that. Personally, this is the board I come to when I want to get riled up and have a good fight; I do the MPSIMS thing at other boards. So the ignore feature wouldn’t work for me. I still think that it’s kind of pointless when you can just choose to click and read the post anyway (I put someone on my list for a minute to see how it works). The ignore thingy also lists their name. Wouldn’t just knowing they were there (and anticipating what they’d say) enough to make you upset?
That’s what the “scroll” button on my mouse is for.
Quite frankly, only one poster here has ever pushed my buttons enough to upset me, and I read every word he wrote, just waiting to see what would finally get him banned. It didn’t take long.
So you don’t like the ignore feature, good for you. But you actually think we shouldn’t be allowed to use it because it doesn’t fit in with how you think others should act in regards to yet others? Good luck taking over the universe.
Obviously, it says something about both parties. So what? Again, and from the pther posts you made in this thread, it just seems like you want everyone here to act a particular way on this issue, and they simply don’t.
I don’t have anyone on ignore, but if I felt a need to, I would happily do so. I like to listen to talk radio in my car, and I listen to a pretty wide spectrum of views. But I don’t bother with listening to Michael Savage or Bernie Ward unless I’m specifically looking to get pissed off at the willful blindness they dish out. (In case you’re not familiar with them, both are rabid pontificators, one radically right, the other radically left.) So, in general, I exclude their imput based on past experience. If I did choose to use ignore here, it would probably be for a similar reason. You can still achieve a rich perspective without examining every bit of chaff for a kernal of truth.
If you’re truly looking to gain knowledge, and some people here probably are, and plenty are probably looking only to be entertained, which is fine, a little discernment and filtering isn’t necessarily a closed mind or unhealthy. If anything, it’s probably healthy at times. Sure you want to examine a wide reange of views, but do you have to examine every single one? Or examine the same one repeatedly?
Only one person is on my list, but I often choose to view his post anyway. Depending on the thread, he can offer a point of view. Often, it is nothing more than a hijack to his pet topic which I feel is intellectually bankrupt.
The humanity of the posters here, at least in genetic terms, isn’t in question. And I don’t think that declining to exclude other posters requires the status of “Zen master.” I think you are attempting to make a point by drawing upon an extreme.
If I understand your meaning of the word “care,” I don’t think that I really “care.“ I have been perplexed by the practice of ignoring, and this thread has helped me to understand the various reasons that people choose to ignore other posters. I still don’t understand how one could become so aggravated with any poster‘s utterances such as to ignore them entirely but, having never used the feature, I was unaware that one is also presented with the option of reading the exluded posts anyway. That’s different than what I thought it was.
There have been other similar points made about ignoring being more or less the same as not having perused the entire content of one’s newspaper, or every thread on these boards, or every site on the web. I don’t agree with this counter. I don’t think it’s exactly the same. In forums such as these we can say things that we would never attempt in face-to-face contact, which can be both/either beneficial or detrimental to overall understanding on a given topic. There’s no threat, physically at any rate. But we can also receive any information with the same assurance, or at least so I believe. I cannot perceive any threat in reading anyone else’s posts, even if I routinely disagree with the poster, or even think s/he is “stupid.” Again, to ignore another’s posts on such bases seems antithetical the purpose and utility of boards like these…
No worrying involved, at least on my end, and I always have and always will interact with these boards in a manner which pleases me.
Then you are not reading my posts to this thread very well. That’s not what I’m saying. If it were, I wouldn’t visit this board at all, as there are quite a few posters with whom I very strongly disagree.
No it would not. No one wields the Ignore List like a weapon. It’s forbidden. All it means is that a user does not view another user’s posts. Period. Stop making it into more than it is. And if you do see posters misusing it by announcing whom they are ignoring, use the little exclamation point to report it.
You listen to everyone’s side, ad nauseum? Goodonya! I listen to well written, persuasive, respectful criticisms of my opinions, and I do so gladly. Frothing one-trick-ponies (FOTP) who keep interrupting others’ discussions with their inanity, aren’t worth my reading time. So I can either change the way I read the board to scan names first, or I can ignore. I choose the latter, as it allows me to read other posts with no preconceived notions of the poster. If one is on my ignore list, it it not because they disagree. It’s because they disrupt rational conversation. (eg. You disagree with me, drmark2000, on the use of Ignore Lists, yet I’m not ignoring you. I’m debating you.)
duffer, I’m not a Howard Stern fan. (I know you weren’t talking about me.)
No, I’m attempting to point out that our stress levels are affected by both rational and irrational considerations, and that taking steps to account for and mitigate the effects of both is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. My point is that you seem to be completely ignoring the perfectly normal foibles of human interaction, which, given that you’re a psychologist, seems somewhat odd.
“Threat” is a pretty strong word - “waste of time” is how I view it. Like I say, in about 3 and a half years of using these boards I’ve never felt compelled to technologically ignore someone, but in that time I’ve gained at least a reasonable idea of how some posters can be expected to respond to a given topic. Some of those I have time for, some I don’t, and I don’t see the problem in using that information, assuming the conclusion is not arrived at rashly. Given that the Ignore feature defaults to off, I don’t see how it is inherently antithetical to the board’s purpose. Certainly, it can be used to simply filter out all views with which you disagree, but it can also be used to simply focus on those posters of all viewpoints who are willing to enter into a debate with intelligence and in good faith.
Let’s take an analogy - do you disagree with the process of peer review in scientific journals? Should everything be indiscriminately published, or is some form of filtering in fact necessary to facilitate the flow of informed debate?
I like the idea of letting people know they are on your ignore list. I haven’t used that function yet mainly because certain people think that if you don’t respond to them, they’ve “won” the argument. I can certainly say to poster X “this is my final post on this subject, and I won’t be answering any further replies you make”, so why not be able to announce a general application of that action?
Oh, I love a good fight… IF it will do any good, even tangentially, and not be completely futile. Which is why I mostly hang out here in the Pit and never even hardly venture into MPSIMS. As to checking out a post of someone who is on my ignore list, as I previously stated, it sometimes allows me to re-evaluate my perspective of them. So it’s all good. Knowing they are there doesn’t upset me. As a matter of fact, it gives me a huge sigh of relief to know there’s no anticipation involved, that I can already (for the most part) predict what they’re going to say and yet I’ll be spared all the inflammatory bits. Win-win, in my humble opinion.
Those “perfectly normal human foibles” constitute the basis for how most psychologists make a living. Ignoring them is an impossibility. What we consider normal, and on that basis accept, eventually get transmuted, by some individuals and groups, into what we consider abnormal, and in need of some kind of remediation or “treatment.” Why not address such issues at the source, at the point where they begin? Would save a lot of trouble, IMO, foreveryone concerned, but that’s another thread.
I think it’s easier for you to term posters whom you might strongly disagree as “a waste of time,” rather than acknowledge the threat that they present to you and what you believe, even if it’s only an unintentional threat.
Of course not. But SDMB is not a scientific journal, peer reviewed or otherwise. There is the possibility, at least at times, of it being something even more valid than that, at least in certain respects. Ignoring other posters negates, to whatever degree that it does, such a possibility.
Ah, well, here we have reached the crux of the issue. I do not ignore people with whom I simply disagree, nor would I seek to. That would be highly dull. You assume that everyone who uses the ignore feature does so in order to remove opinions with which they disagree. As numerous people have pointed out, this is not true. Indeed, this has been pointed out so regularly within this thread that it almost seems that you are intentionally, and rather ironically, ignoring the point because it doesn’t suit your case. If you’re so unwilling to credit your fellow board-members with the critical faculties necessary to distinguish between intelligent people with different opinions and mere idiots, it strikes me as strange that you’re bothering to fight for this board’s intellectual health at all, as we must surely be beyond help.
There are certain people who repeatedly post statements I find rude, obnoxious, idiotic, willfully ignorant and/or intentionally dishonest. I choose to deprive myself of their intellectual magic by placing them on my “Ignore” list simply because it facilitates the Ignoring Process[sup]tm[/sup] for me.
My reasons for reading the SDMB may be different than yours. I would prefer to have the “Ignore” choice, along with the “read post anyway” choice, even if another person disapproves of the Ignore feature.
A definite point of interest, if not necessarily “the crux.” Such absolutes!
At no time have I ever stated or implied such an assumption. I have acknowledged and indeed agreed with other posters recognizing their own, quite human limitations and, perhaps, health issues, among other things, to justify ignoring another poster.
You resort again to extremes. Having done so repeatedly in your posts, this belies something significant. YOU have assumed, and with notable intensity, that my views constitute some criticism of you, and perhaps of others as well. This isn’t good news. You have become strongly defensive. Of what, I might ask? I’ve twanged a nerve.
Here we have an example of yet another commonly applied technique on these boards. Faced with a challenge (even if only a perceived one) one can choose to use the ignore option, or one can attempt to rally up other members by implying some larger attack on all of them, that simply does not exist. Still, you can try…
And I am not “fighting“ for these boards‘ “intellectual health.” I am not “fighting“ for anything in particular. Your choice of vocabulary betrays you. I posted some questions and the ensuing thread has been enormously interesting, to me, and apparently worth considering and responding to for others. I consider this desirable.
As for you, or anyone around here, being “surely… beyond help,” tediously enough you again give yourself away with your own choice of words. You insult other posters by attributing your own limitations to them.
That’s the point. Fans of Howard listen to him to hear what he says next. Non-fans listen to him more to hear what he says next…so they have more to complain about. But that’s ignoring the segment of non-fans who don’t bother to listen to him because they simply don’t care what he says next.
I think users of the ignore list fall into the latter category. They’ve had enough of that person that they simply don’t care what is said next.
