Some might take that as a badge of honor.
I have too unsubscribed from a bunch of P&R threads because they have gone off on terrible wasteful tangents that kept being triggered by specific users, but ignoring won’t help because people reply and stroke the fire (either intentionally or unintentionally) so I will still see the replies to it. I don’t have a solution though.
I think that’s a terrible idea. If a person is actually trolling, then that tells them they’re succeeding. If they just happen to be irritating to me, I for one would much rather silently withdraw my attention from them and not make a thing about it because the whole point for me, at least, is to not start fights with people.
Alerting the ignored person that they have been ignored and who ignored them i think would go a long way to balancing that emotional burden. As long as (imo) it also banned said Ignoree from PMing the Ignorer.
The world is divided into two groups of people on the internet: those that post in good faith and those that do not.
For those NOT posting in good faith getting ignored will either drive them away or drive them to flame out and get themselves banned. In a sense ignoring fills the gap between first engagement and moderation.
OTOH there are lots of people posting in good faith that might get ignored for more reasonable reasons. Perhaps someone is posting in good faith but their arguments or style are still offensive or emotionally taxing for some people. Perhaps there’s simply a communication issue where although both people are being honest they just incapable of understanding the other person’s point of view and can’t stand to read it (and that person isn’t going to change their mind). Perhaps they just can’t help themselves responding to certain posters.
A Good Faith poster will take getting ignored as a sign to reflect upon the person that ignored them and their own posting styles. But it also shifts the burden to them as well. This also fills a gap between moderation and engagement by letting posters somewhat tailor their experience without imposing their values upon the entire forum.
This differs from Liking and the way Likes shift the tone of Forums because unless the Ignoree makes their being ignored public it remains private. Of course this should probably be enforceable as forum policy to discourage people parading their Ignore Lists around.
I think it’s much more likely that a person posting in good faith would receive an ignore notification as a sort of attack or at least a petty insult. Certainly I would be upset by it.
It would be, but if ignore were implemented, wouldn’t you want to know a person didn’t want to engage with you? As a good faith poster you might feel offended and hurt… but you’re ignored anyway whether you like it or not. Better to know than speak to a poster who will never speak back (imo).
It also does shift that emotional burden. Otherwise ignore lists are like Ring Bearers.
Not really, no. The whole point of an ignore feature, and especially a selective ignore feature (‘ignore Fishbreath in Space Games Discussion Thread’, ‘ignore Fishbreath in P&R’) is to reduce interactions with people who happen to rub you the wrong way without being bad for the community as a whole. Auto-sending them a message, and especially auto-sending them a message they can’t reply to, goes against the purpose of the thing, and would with 100% certainty be both used and interpreted as an attack and a petty insult. Say you’re in a conversation at a party with someone you don’t like. It’s the difference between leaving the conversation without saying anything, and leaving after shouting “I’M NOT LISTENING TO YOU” at the person you don’t like.
I never ignored anyone on usenet or on the old forums personally, but I can see why some people might want it.
A lot of what made “entertaining trolling” work on usenet was the ability to ignore people you found less than delightful. That would be great here, and I agree with the more nuanced implementation of only allowing limited-duration and limited-scope thread or category-specific ignores too.
The user being ignored definitely shouldn’t be notified. That’s just passive/aggressive bullshit. It isn’t about them, it’s your choice as a user.
Absolutely not. It creates offense and hurt that wouldn’t be there otherwise, but has no actual informational value.
Guys? He’s a fucking troll and he’s ruining P&R at a time when many people rely on it for valuable information and discussions.
But he’s a nice troll, so apparently there are different rules.
I think there are two conversational threads here. One is a discussion about some specific guy in P&R and one is about ignore functions and how they should work and be used. I have no opinion on the former, but I want ignore so I can ignore people I don’t like but are contributing to the community.
Right but we’re only discussing an ignore feature because the mods refuse to ban him.
I think putting someone on ignore without informing them is wrong. The argument that the forum is about communication but not letting someone know you are disengaging is not the correct way to do it. In the example above about walking away from the group it can still be noticed that you stepped away. IMHO
This specific resurgence of the conversation about ignore started because someone was frustrated with this guy, yes, but it is an old conversation and a long-standing need.
So you would private message someone to tell them you are ignoring them in a context where automatic notifications don’t exist (I. e. every implementation of ignore I have ever seen)? Because I sure wouldn’t. Yes, I would probably post that I am stepping away from the current argument that prompted the desire to ignore someone, if that were the situation. But I can’t imagine a productive reason to also declare that I was uninterested in ever hearing from them again.
Discourse lacking an ignore function is absurd on its face. This is still being debated?
I won’t belabor it but i disagree. But this assumes both parties are Good Faith posters. And as a Good Faith poster knowing that what you’re saying or how you’re saying it is offensive to some would be valuable information.
I do get the impression that people automatically categorize those they want to ignore as being in the Bad Faith category, rather than the more ambiguous “I recognize they’re posting in Good Faith but personally can’t stand them” category, though i’m sure a few be able to split that emotional hair. And you don’t want to engage with Bad Faith posters, you want them to disappear.
But yea, ignoring with notification would be used offensively by some to shit on people they didn’t like.
To me ignoring without notification brings about the world that wumpus doesn’t want where a disruptive poster that nobody likes continues to post forever into the void when 50% of the regulars have ignored them, and where moderation is effectively ceded to individuals being forced to curate the forum. I mean, i don’t think that’s the use case for ignore 90% of the time but i think that’s what he fears would happen.
However…
…I don’t think it would be worth notifying people if ignore was per thread or forum, but only if it were site-wide.
Yes, a polite racist is exactly what we need. Or more like, a racist who knows to avoid keywords and to hand out pats on the heads once in awhile just to be sure. Next up, cookies.
I don’t read a lot of P&R so I’m certain I’m not getting the full effect of our new member but I have to agree with both of @Fishbreath’s points. Is it better to ignore someone, ban them, or just dogpile on them? I don’t know. I do know that my take away from the article was the opposite of @Wumpus. He focused on the good of the majority - the problem child makes others spend more emotional effort so they are the problem. For whatever reason I think that a different portion is more important.
The point of this is that it’s your job, when confronted by an angry user, to do the emotional labor to figure out where they’re coming from. It may not be one you can solve and all you can do is communicate the expectations for participation in your community. But it may be the cause is a systemic problem in your community preventing people from feeling heard, and that you’d be well-served to fix.
…
So, hopefully by this point you have an idea of what emotional labor is and how to use it to analyze situations. You may be asking “how does this bring different types of people into the community?” Here’s the thing — one of the privileges — and I use that word deliberately — of being the “default” type of person, whether that’s gender, race, class, or even playstyle, — is that you have to do less emotional and mental work just to exist in a given space. Your speech habits go unremarked, your assumptions are unchallenged, and your experiences are given the most weight. That means everyone who is not the default has to do a whole bunch of work just to participate.
Our new user is clearly the minority and feeling unheard. Has he gone beyond that to willful trolling? I don’t know but my limited exposure says no.
