disabled
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I was wondering if you could elaborate on how certain communication styles can give the mistaken impression of wrecking.
not OP, but one example that has come up before when this subject has been brought up: an autistic person who is very literal/direct and is asking a lot of frank clarification questions can (especially online) be hard to distinguish from a bad faith troll who is "just asking questions
"
leads to a lot of ND users catching strays.
This is one of the big ways it can happen. Also, sometimes you can be sincere and someone will assume you're being ironic. I think that one is a symptom of irony poisoning, though, were people get so used to being ironic and reading ironic comments that sincerity reads as ironic sincerity (which can easily be actual wrecker behavior). These things won't just affect ND people, they affect everyone, but I think they affect ND people disproportionately. @BeanisBrain@hexbear.net tagging you because I replied to a reply instead of replying directly to you.
These are good answers, thanks!
And that's one reason I'm glad the site's been moving away from that culture. That, and it allowed a lot of people to post reactionary shit under the guise of "no, I'm just doing a bit, I swear."
I agree, this has definitely been a problem. I also agree with @TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net that despite these issues, this site is one of the best places online. With the right conversations and changes as a community (which have already been ongoing), I think we can make it much better.
100%. a large part of the culture of the site is inherited from 2010s "dirtbag left" circles, and sometimes it's hard to separate the banter from what just seems like normalized aggression.
Agreed. I didn't think anonymous online spaces could be this eager and heartfelt without devolving to everyone being horrible to each other or being smug dorks, so I'm pleasantly surprised!
There's still some redditisms in the way we communicate that make me kind of side-eye, but overall, a much nicer place than I thought possible.
This happens to me online and IRL nearly all of the time. I've stopped worrying anymore and just make a virtue of it. There is no point in stressing myself over it anymore. I can't play these constant social games; say what you mean and mean what you say, I say.
Often it's not construed as "just asking questions" but as "gotchas" and other ways of "being a debatebro".
I really want to make a master-post about this (and other about similar things) because it's a well-known (I think) issue among the site's ND community and I'd like to put together a good explainer to send to people when they ask for clarification about it. I've really appreciated your comments about this in the past, I think you brought up a lot of great points (as you are here).
I say go for it, that'd be a really interesting analysis to read.
I'm thinking less of an analysis, really, and more of an outline of the problem and the experiences that ND (and other) comrades have brought up regarding this in recent times. I'll probably try to put it together when I have some time.
for sure! that's kinda what i was trying to express: bad faith actors often try to gotcha people or make them look bad under the guise of "just asking questions" (i believe the slang term for this is "JAQing off"). but an overly defensive posture against this kind of thing on this site often leads to ND users catching strays for actually asking good faith questions.
This isn't very important to the immediate issue, but the thing with jaq-offs is that they are trying to advance certain conclusions in a deniable way by phrasing it as a question. Any answer given is kind of immaterial. E.g. "why do poor black people commit more crime than poor white people?" to spread racist ideas. You can do it in a debate, but it's more present in monologues and open forums.
A gotcha is about either responding to someone or, especially, asking a question to lay a rhetorical trap so you can bait someone and then attack them with some kind of meaningless cheapshot like appealing to hypocrisy. It is overwhelmingly more prevalent in debate, and people notoriously also call something a gotcha that is a legitimate counterargument that they don't like (famously Sarah Palin did this).
Edit: I agree with your actual point as I understand it, to be clear
Yeah, "proving me wrong is a gotcha and you're a debate nerd" is fairly common (not just here, this is everywhere). As you've pointed out before "nerd" (and associated terms that end up just being synonyms) can often be used as thinly veiled (not necessarily even intentional, often subconscious) proxies for ableism - they're used to refer to people who express themselves in ways the speaker dislikes.