After sleeping a bit on my post, I think I identified a big part of what pushes me away: Statements of Absolute Truth. When an entire post asserts harsh opinions (or facts, it’s about the tone, not the actual content) and leaves no way to engage, it feels like I’m driving through town reading graffiti instead of participating in a conversation.
The (to me) nice posts are the ones where people show their viewpoints and ask for feedback, synthesize other posts into more actionable advice, recommend (not command) alternative options, share resources, and so on.
Yes, that’s just what happens, and while I think it’s commendable that you’re able to put up with so much, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so and just disengage if I don’t see the possibility of having my counterpart learn or adapt within a reasonable amount of conversation. In this case, I just end up leaving the discussion (explicit example here) and also won’t read on because I don’t consider their input to be valuable enough.
Here’s my input for a possible moderation policy:
- Encourage engaging, productive and civil discussion.
- Discourage posts that do not add information (just repeating previous posts)
- Discourage posts that do not produce constructive conversations
- Liberally use nudges to guide and educate people (or threads) towards better discussions
- How about starting with 3 hour cooldowns for aggressive-turning threads or posters? This is strong enough to make it a good signal, but not bad enough that it interrupts normal conversation