wasn’t gonna post this because it keeps dragging this thread in the mud but I shared it with a few people who agreed with the sentiment so here it is. I’ll drop it entirely if it’s not well received.
I’m kind of sick of my responses to this too, that’s why I stopped posting in this thread (and believe it or not I’ve been trying to back off in general). But I do sort of want to bring this up while we’re all here having meta commentary about how much this sucks and we’re all agreeing with upvotes, before we all move on and do nothing about it. What’s the right thing to do about this toxic, draining behavior we’re all sick of?
The response that’s most popular, and usually gets trotted out when this is brought up, is to just ignore it. This is great advice for real world scenarios in public spaces, with people you won’t really interact with again - get through it, and then you can move on and not deal with it anymore. But in a small community of forum regulars, mixed in with new posters, all ignoring this does is tacitly accept it. The new posters that filter in will inevitably not know the unwritten rule of “literally everyone on the forum pretend the bad guy doesn’t exist and maybe he’ll stop”, and it takes just one person (or even nobody at all?) to provide enough response for the behavior to continue. The silence is also interpreted as acceptance, not rejection - nobody is objecting to the content, therefore it’s fine. It teaches other posters they can post in that manner, because they don’t see anyone objecting to that, and it teaches other posters that this is the kind of content you should expect.
The response I’ve been trying, which I’m now trying to stop doing because it also sucks, is to just call it out. “Hey, this is what you’re doing, you know you’re doing this, we know you aren’t posting in good honest faith because you’ve literally said so on multiple occasions, we all are tired”. This communicates a lack of acceptance for the behavior, which in some ways is better, but often it is escalatory and inflammatory. It creates an uncivil attitude in the forum, which is arguably worse to normalize than just being an obnoxious and persistent troll. It’s pretty clear that this sort of posting isn’t deterred by social pressure at all, so applying it just makes the experience less pleasant for everyone else. So that doesn’t work either.
So I guess what I’m asking is... does anybody have any ideas? Do we really just have to live with this in any given thread? Is there always just gonna be a chance that Awaclus comes in to make a side point, then argues it to death, and then has the gall to assert that other people in the thread are going off-topic from his already off-topic rant? Either we want this to continue, or we don’t - and if we do, sure, fine, status quo it is. But like, I feel like we largely don’t, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything we can do about it. We could discuss things somewhere else? Maybe we could push to have others moderate away this trolling? I’m just stumped, but its really unpleasant to deal with, and I don’t know how to handle it.