Even less sure where to put this

Discussion in 'Brainbent' started by seebs, Feb 7, 2017.

  1. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    No one is forcing you to respond immediately. You are free to take that hour and check things over. You can even post in the thread to the effect of "hey I wanna reevaluate the situation for a bit so I might not respond for some amount of time while I try to figure things out". The thread's 9 pages long dude, you could reread the entire thing in a reasonable amount of time.
    ... Yeah that is actually because a negative snuck in where it wasn't supposed to go, I will edit the post.
    I meant to say "A forum labeled "Group Hug" will be assumed to be an emotional space" and ask that if you have someone other than yourself who was under the impression that it is NOT, they please come forward.
    I did go back and I have in fact misremembered. You did not accuse LT of lying within the first page.
    You still came into the thread in a way that gave the impression you were just going to yell at LT about how wrong she is. In the future it might help to try and phrase things more gently if you are actually interested in what made someone say these things.
    I would like to know what you thought you were going to accomplish by talking about the things LT said, and about LT, metaphorically on her front porch... when she was not interested in talking to you?
     
    • Like x 4
  2. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    Testing to see if this is overridden as easily as removing the member number from the quote tag.
     
  3. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    Nope did in fact get a "quoted" notification
     
    • Like x 1
  4. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    Second test? I removed the member number and the message number, do I think it would be like just writing a thing manually.
     
  5. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    yes it now only gave me the "replied" alert
     
  6. seebs

    seebs Benevolent Dictator

    Point is not so much "I can't respond quickly" as "this is more time sink than I feel like putting into the thing".

    "An emotional space" does not, to me, imply "no fact checking ever", or "vent threads only".

    I think the question of what impressions form of a person's actions is not best resolved by asserting unconditionally that the impression is exclusively "given" by their actions and never has anything to do with anything else. :P

    And I don't think there existed any sequence of words which could have caused clarification from someone who started out that aggressively hostile.

    Well, what I hoped to accomplish was that other people, who were capable of reading whole paragraphs, but who also comprehended LT's position, would clarify. And that happened.

    Worth considering also: What do you think LT thought she was going to accomplish by talking about me, and about my forum, metaphorically on my front porch, when she was not interested in talking to me? Because I am not super impressed by the merits of starting threads to bitch about how bad someone is if you're categorically unwilling to talk to them, or starting threads to bitch about a forum's administration if you're categorically unwilling to talk to the forum's administration. It just doesn't seem like behavior that can possibly have a productive purpose, from my perspective.
     
  7. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    Okay, so that's at least a way to respond with quotes without the notif, which lets people disengage from a conversation in an ignored thread. There may be other reasons it doesn't work that I'm not thinking of ... I need to go get a food.
     
    • Like x 2
  8. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    Then say that. Don't make absolute statements about the way things in the thread were stated if you aren't willing to back that up. Say "my impression is", not "People said". It's not that hard.
    It does however imply "Might be uncharitable or not perfectly logical and disregard a couple ettiquette points".
    You can take your dislike for certain english idioms to someone who is not esl. I cannot change a turn of phrase that exists and is perfectly capable of communicating the things I want to communicate.
    Jokingly nitpicking other people's communication style in this context comes off pretty poorly and I am less than amused.
    Why are you continuously framing LT as unreasonable?
    This would have been easier accomplished by making a new thread to talk about yourself in the first place, but I am fairly confident you have gotten that point by now so I will stop beating a dead horse.
    I don't know, I am not LT.
    Your personal opinion on the merits of making that thread likely did not particularly matter to LT when she made the thread. Also it did in fact lead to discussion of forum culture and what parts people disagree or agree with. Sometimes a more snappy, less "academic" tone can make discussions of this kind more comfortable for people.
     
    • Like x 6
  9. rje

    rje here comes the sun

    Ah, ok, good i wasnt for sure if that was the common forum way or just being talkedabout. As long as we can address it in some manner, that's a fine way
     
  10. prismaticvoid

    prismaticvoid Too Too Abstract

    note: this isn't like a solid standard or anything, just as far as I can tell was the consensus people reached. I haven't seen a ton of it happening but I have seen at least a little, and it seems to help?
     
    • Like x 4
  11. seebs

    seebs Benevolent Dictator

    I don't have an obligation to prove everything I claim. I have an obligation to prove everything I want to insist that other people agree to be true. But, especially given the complaints about me taking things as factual claims in the vent thread forum, and this being definitely actually the vent thread forum, it seems pretty fucking ridiculous for you to insist that I must not say anything here that I don't have the inclination to go research and prove.

    If you think it didn't happen, that's fine by me. I think it happened, but I'm not motivated enough to go looking to try to prove it.

    Sure.

    It is not "nitpicking" when I assume that you meant the thing you said and not a different thing.

    I'm not joking. I interpreted your text as meaning exactly what I understand that phrase to mean.

    Because I believe LT's behavior to be unreasonable. How is this surprising?

    Except I didn't want to talk "about myself". I wanted to talk about those claims.

    I didn't ask you what you knew with unshakeable certainty to be the case, but what you thought might be the case.

    Okay, see, this is what's getting to me: You seem to understand that LT is allowed to do things without particularly caring about my opinions of them, but you seem very confused that I might do things without particularly caring about LT's opinions of them. The closest I can come to an explanation is that you're giving very high weight to the "vent thread" presupposition, but even if we assume that literally everyone else got the memo about "brainbent is now 100% vent thread exclusive, no threads in it are ever for any other reason", you keep asking questions about my behavior which presuppose that I knew that and agreed with it. And since you already know I didn't know, that seems pointless.

    Obviously, what I thought I was going to do was participate in a discussion. That it was, in fact, not a discussion-participating-in circumstance was not known to me. And now that you know that, all of the questions about what I thought I would gain by discussing things in a vent thread are answered.

    ... which is to say, actually it was a thread for discussing things, rather than a vent thread?

    This is not convincing me that there is an actual coherent and understood/agreed-upon social protocol that I violated, rather than a complete lack of understood and agreed-upon protocol.
     
  12. local troublemaker

    local troublemaker professional tumblrina

    @seebs Feel free to respond to me in this thread if you like, or feel free to ignore.
    My thread was not all about you. It was not a Seebs.txt. It was a general complaint/vent about aspects of forum culture that piss me off. You were included. You were not the sole focus. You didn't initially engage with any of my posts about you, you engaged with my posts about general forum culture, which I am not interested in discussing with you because that is way too many spoons for no results.
    You'll also notice that I had discussions with many people in that thread, some of whom could definitely be considered people I was talking about, and we managed to have conversations. I am not trying to claim that I can say whatever I want about anyone but no one can respond, neener neener. I am uncomfortable talking forum politics with you, specifically, because talking to you demands way too many spoons from me and the likelihood that anything would come of it besides making me even more pissed at you is a fraction of a percent.
    Also, I don't really see much point in trying to accuse me of lying because I have a negative view of your character. If I had said "Seebs made a whole thread about how much she loves to drown puppies", that would be a blatant lie easily disproven. If I say I consider you to be frequently disingenuous, there is no concrete way for you to prove or disprove that. My interactions with and observations of you are what have led me to that conclusion; further interactions and observation can either solidify it further or change it.
    I am, again, pretty suspect of the claim that you quoted MY post, in MY thread, to criticize MY word choice, with the expectation that other people would clarify MY words and thought process, which you misinterpreted to begin with.
     
    • Like x 9
  13. local troublemaker

    local troublemaker professional tumblrina

    I'm still curious why this is in Brainbent and not TCHGB, because this is pretty clearly Argument Island material to me.
     
    • Like x 2
  14. AbsenteeLandLady124

    AbsenteeLandLady124 Well-Known Member

    I had no idea personally that brainbent as a whole was now considered vent thread space, although I do have that impression of The Holler Closet subforum
     
  15. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    So engaging you according to the same discussion protocol you used when engaging in LT's thread is now wrong, which you have never explicitly stated, and you can frustratedly yell at me for assuming we are still going to engage on that very same protocol? Because you did literally criticize a lack of fact checking either on this page or the page before this one. That is literally a thing you said.
    Do not try to twist this around on me. I am matching your tone.
    ":P" is generally used to communicate a joking/tongue-in-cheek tone.
    What is the definition of nitpicking you are using, because I understood the word to mean "pick apart phrasing/small details to criticize/dismiss the broader point" which was what you did or what I understood you to do. You picked apart my phrasing in order to dismiss the point I was making. The point I was making was "you engaged in the discussion fairly aggressively which contributed to defensive reactions"
    Rephrase: Why do you keep using LT's assumed emotional state/tone to dismiss her position and why do you use those arguments in a way to frame her uncharitably in the ongoing discussion with others?
    And yet you did. At length. And are still doing it.
    I don't have any thoughts on the matter I am not in the habit of trying to divine why other people do things.
    I mean it is a fair assumption that you care about someone's opinions when you come somewhere to argue about those opinions. Since LT did not seek you out it's a fair assumption that she was indifferent to your input.
    I'm not particularly confused by the way, please stop trying to divine my emotions.
    I am literally talking to you right now, stop trying to guess at my thought process and ask if you want to know what they are. I am asking the questions I ask to figure out why you are doing things and how to get you to stop doing things that are unproductive, annoying and hurtful. I don't presuppose jackshit. Fucking stop.
    I am also in fact capable of nuanced opinions. I am pretty annoyed that you are apparently now strawmanning my position into a laughably reductive bullshit position. Try again.
    That's nice, except it apparently wasn't that obvious or else nobody would be asking.
    Things can be hybrid-threads. As has been pointed out multiple times.
    That's what "No rules" tends to result in, yes. Good job.
    The social protocol you violated had little to do with vent thread, by the way and a lot to do with "aggressively yelling at someone that their opinions are wrong in a manner often used as a silencing tactic".
     
    • Like x 13
  16. rje

    rje here comes the sun

    Same. I remember being confused why there were vent threads in that forum when it looked like holler closet was where those went. I actually came to the conclusion the ppl allowed to post vent threads right in Brainbent were special for some reason, like they were mods or forum olbies or something lol (Including you Kathy, I initially thought you were a mod)
     
  17. Re Allyssa

    Re Allyssa Sylph of Heart

    Cross posting my understanding of brainbent's purpose because I feel it goes here too:
     
    • Like x 1
  18. AbsenteeLandLady124

    AbsenteeLandLady124 Well-Known Member

    huh, why's that?
    eta: that's directed at the 'thinking I was a mod' thing
     
  19. seebs

    seebs Benevolent Dictator

    I think you're using different rules for burden of proof than I am. I think it's perfectly acceptable to make a claim and not be inclined to put in the effort to prove it, as long as you're willing to accept that people will then not necessarily be convinced. I don't feel like dredging through a long and upsetting thread looking for evidence of specific upsetting things so I can have long tedious arguments about whether I interpreted them correctly in order to support a claim I don't particularly care about. That doesn't mean I can't advance the claim, just that I'm not motivated enough to prove it if people don't believe it or agree with it.

    I may be using it wrong.

    "Nitpicking" is "pointing at minor things which are irrelevant". And I didn't think it was nitpicking, because it seemed to me that your claim was that I bore sole and exclusive responsibility for the negative reactions, because I was the one "giving the impression", and it had nothing to do with other people's decisions as to interpretation. If that wasn't actually your point, then I misunderstood your claim. But it's not "nitpicking" to have misunderstood someone's point.

    I'm not dismissing her position based on assumed emotional state. I'm dismissing any useful possibility of deriving information about her position from her because of her unambiguous statement that she will not engage or answer questions. And if you think that it frames someone "uncharitably" to assert that they're unwilling to clarify what they are actually stating, well, then I agree, but that's not going to stop me from pointing out the behavior. Yes, I think poorly of that behavior; I think it is the root of most of the unfixed/unfixable social conflicts here.

    So, this happens a lot. It's very simple: I will typically make at least some effort to respond to the things people say. If they say things about me, responses are likely to be about me. If they say things about a given person, such as BPD Anon, my responses are likely to be about BPD Anon. This doesn't denote some kind of innate preference in topic that I brought to the table; it's a thing that arises from which conversational threads people pursue.

    See, I'm coming to this with a slightly different framing, which is: I am on this forum already.

    So coming here to discuss forum administration is a pretty good example of "come somewhere to argue about those opinions", and posting about how the forum is run and how I do things, on this forum, is a pretty good example of "seeking [me] out", from my perspective. There are lots of places people can talk about me if they don't want to hear what I think on the matter; my forum is probably not the best choice there.

    So, the problem I have is, the things you want me to "stop" doing are, so far as I can tell, things I wasn't doing. Rather, they are things that are ways you might interpret my actions if you started with very different presuppositions.

    And on one of those: Check out the "vent thread tagging" thing. Note several posts from different people who had substantially different expectations from each other, and from either of us, as to what this forum did or did not imply. So, now that we've established that there wasn't universal agreement that every thread in Brainbent is automatically and always a vent thread, where does that get us?

    Every such question has, so far as I can tell, carried the presupposition that obviously I understood the thread to be "a vent thread". You certainly stated that you thought it was obvious and well-known that the forum was entirely for vent threads.

    That's an interesting point. I suppose I'd been thinking of "vent thread" as a boolean.

    The problem isn't "no rules". It's "no rules" combined with "so people make up social protocols, don't discuss or explain them, and get angry if someone violates those protocols". That's been, consistently, the source of the worst of the blowups; people coming up with rules like "you must never comment on the contents of a vent thread outside of that vent thread", while other people come up with "you must never respond to venting in the thread if you disagree with it" and still other people come up with "you should definitely followup on conflicts from vent threads somewhere else". But the underlying problem is turning a vague sense of what you think you would like people to do into a general expectation that anyone who doesn't make the same call is probably doing so out of malice or disrespect.

    "Aggressively yelling" sounds a lot angrier to me than anything I've seen here from anyone involved.
     
  20. rigorist

    rigorist On the beach

    I'm gonna cut out the snark, post this, and then go to bed.

    Seebs: you are showing signs of distress and fighting like crazy over some really petty bullshit. This isn't good for the site and it isn't good for you.

    You've appointed a couple of sub-mods to handle day to day operations. Maybe you need one or two more for housekeeping duties and you could appoint them.

    But after you have some housekeeping staff in place, take a break. Log off for a week. Fuck, log off tumblr for a week, too.
     
    • Like x 15
  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice