hobbsyoyo
Deity
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2012
- Messages
- 26,575
You shouldn't be afraid to report something you find unconducive to civil discourse in an RD thread, but you also shouldn't expect every report to warrant or receive a response. Beyond that, I'm afraid there is nothing any one person or mod can do to improve the quality of RD threads - which is really what you're getting at.
All you can do is try and have positive interactions in all threads and in particular the RD threads and trust that enough people will do the same that quality will improve overall. And if you really want to improve quality across the board then you have to put in the effort to post in a wide breadth of threads, even ones that don't particularly suite your interests. It's easy to narrow your focus here just to the subjects you really like and when everyone does that, quality across the board suffers as CFC OT, while pretty large, is no longer large enough to attain critical mass wherein all subjects/threads of merit will stay alive. There simply isn't enough posters with broad enough interests (and more importantly - not enough posters with enough time or desire to post broadly) to support that. But every army starts with one recruit and you (in the general sense) can really, truly help that out by trying to support good discourse by posting broadly. Even a single well thought-out post in a teetering thread can spark a torrent of discussion - so make that your goal even if you don't care about the particular subject.
Another important aspect to any threads (but RD threads in particular) that you should keep in mind when starting a new one is to try and build a positive, collaborative environment. Too often, (well, basically, 100% of the time) posters approach posting with an adversarial mindset. This isn't helped with OP's that frame a discussion in right v wrong terms, or an us v them mindset. You can try and achieve this by putting together an inclusive framework for discussion by acknowledging the 'other side' of the discussion from the outset and by at least identifying (and agreeing where possible) with some of the stances of the natural 'other side' to the subject at hand. That, or you can simply frame the discussion as open-ended as possible and try and avoid baiting people with dog-whistle phrasing (lolbertarians comes to mind) in your OP.
This all assumes that improving the quality of threads is your desire, of course. If not, then please ignore.
To finish off this lolwtf massive post of glorious victory, I have to say you can't account for personal tastes and not every thread will thrive. To use a recent experience of my own as an example, I took a great deal of time to post a non-RD thread (to attract more posters despite it being a serious thread, I'm afraid RD labels turn people off) about US college issues. It was a massive OP and I took care to break it into sections (with spoilers) to allow readers to cherry-pick just what they wanted to talk about. Despite all of my efforts, it died rather quickly and in particular, one post from an extremely reputable poster quite hurt my feelings. His point was spot on - I had said something stupid - but the way he responded (he said, and I quote: lolwut) hurt not because he was right, but because he didn't bother to take the 30 seconds to explain why I was wrong. I feel he had a touch of the adversarial mindset and was more interested in scoring points against me (on one point out of 50 or so I had put in the OP
) than he was in actually discussing. You can't account for that type of thing, no one can, and it will happen from time to time and even kill good threads. So it's best to toughen up and keep at it and don't become discouraged by the occasional bad post.
It's only when we've all become adversarial and we've all become dismissive and demoralized towards CFC OT that the whole thing comes unraveled. It's actually a fear of mine that we are, as a whole, approaching that precipice. Help us step back.
All you can do is try and have positive interactions in all threads and in particular the RD threads and trust that enough people will do the same that quality will improve overall. And if you really want to improve quality across the board then you have to put in the effort to post in a wide breadth of threads, even ones that don't particularly suite your interests. It's easy to narrow your focus here just to the subjects you really like and when everyone does that, quality across the board suffers as CFC OT, while pretty large, is no longer large enough to attain critical mass wherein all subjects/threads of merit will stay alive. There simply isn't enough posters with broad enough interests (and more importantly - not enough posters with enough time or desire to post broadly) to support that. But every army starts with one recruit and you (in the general sense) can really, truly help that out by trying to support good discourse by posting broadly. Even a single well thought-out post in a teetering thread can spark a torrent of discussion - so make that your goal even if you don't care about the particular subject.
Another important aspect to any threads (but RD threads in particular) that you should keep in mind when starting a new one is to try and build a positive, collaborative environment. Too often, (well, basically, 100% of the time) posters approach posting with an adversarial mindset. This isn't helped with OP's that frame a discussion in right v wrong terms, or an us v them mindset. You can try and achieve this by putting together an inclusive framework for discussion by acknowledging the 'other side' of the discussion from the outset and by at least identifying (and agreeing where possible) with some of the stances of the natural 'other side' to the subject at hand. That, or you can simply frame the discussion as open-ended as possible and try and avoid baiting people with dog-whistle phrasing (lolbertarians comes to mind) in your OP.
This all assumes that improving the quality of threads is your desire, of course. If not, then please ignore.
To finish off this lolwtf massive post of glorious victory, I have to say you can't account for personal tastes and not every thread will thrive. To use a recent experience of my own as an example, I took a great deal of time to post a non-RD thread (to attract more posters despite it being a serious thread, I'm afraid RD labels turn people off) about US college issues. It was a massive OP and I took care to break it into sections (with spoilers) to allow readers to cherry-pick just what they wanted to talk about. Despite all of my efforts, it died rather quickly and in particular, one post from an extremely reputable poster quite hurt my feelings. His point was spot on - I had said something stupid - but the way he responded (he said, and I quote: lolwut) hurt not because he was right, but because he didn't bother to take the 30 seconds to explain why I was wrong. I feel he had a touch of the adversarial mindset and was more interested in scoring points against me (on one point out of 50 or so I had put in the OP
) than he was in actually discussing. You can't account for that type of thing, no one can, and it will happen from time to time and even kill good threads. So it's best to toughen up and keep at it and don't become discouraged by the occasional bad post.It's only when we've all become adversarial and we've all become dismissive and demoralized towards CFC OT that the whole thing comes unraveled. It's actually a fear of mine that we are, as a whole, approaching that precipice. Help us step back.
