thread origination derail

No.

People take ownership of the discussions they want to start for the most part and I'm uninterested in setting up a mechanism for people to disavow responsibility for their own words. James Joyce used to pick bar fights and then hide behind Ernest Hemingway, shouting "Take care of him, Hemingway!" Having an explicit Hemingway account seems useless at best.

 

Seconding that no.

If you want to sit back and passively observe conversations without risking accountability, you can sit back and passively observe. If you want to steer conversations or initiate discussion, you can own up to your own agency. You can't just tell the monkeys to dance while pretending you're not involved at all.

Incidentally, even though you're talking about what happened in this thread, your post has nothing to do with what this thread is about, and if you wanted to discuss the issue, it would have been the ideal moment to create your own TSM thread.

 

If you want to initiate a thread, you need to own the fact that you want to initiate the thread.

In the case where a split happens, it's often because the discussion isn't of the post, but about the post -- and that's often, possibly even usually, unwelcome. And sometimes it's a case where someone really did want to start a discussion, in which case, absolutely they should be the OP of the discussion they wanted to start.

Note, by the way: People don't "own" threads in general, with some fuzzy heuristics around things like personal vent threads. The OP is not the arbiter of a thread's topic or direction; you post a thing, people get to talk about it, they don't have to have the conversation the OP wanted. That's how public discussions work.

What you do have to take ownership of is your choices about, say, which discussions you want to start.

 

We're not usually huge sticklers for a thread needing to stay on a single narrowly defined thing, but this tangent is well and truly off-topic on a TSM thread created with a pretty specific site-management point in mind (and clearly stated), so I'm mainly approving to say that 1) we're not debating this here, and 2) please stop derailing this thread with something this far off-topic

 

Unless there's a really compelling reason, my usual answer is "if I don't have permission from the other party, I don't talk about it".

 

I still feel that the thing you have about stuff that gets wiggled is really its own topic, but you seem pretty committed to posting it in other threads, so... okay?

It's probably true that you're not being treated very well. In the time you've been here, you've been openly cruel to a lot of people, including the mods, and have not really improved this noticably. When people express distress about a specific thing you do, you tend to respond to Something Else; either a more extreme complaint than they made, or an unrelated complaint, or whatever. The actual things don't seem to get changed.

So, basically: You're a jerk to people, including people who have definitely not been jerks to you, you frequently escalate things, and attempting to communicate with you at all is like slogging through taffy. This is frustrating, unpleasant, and unrewarding. And it doesn't even seem to help you! So yeah, people are probably pretty burned out on that.

Rigs was completely right about one of the things he said: What you are doing isn't working. You should try doing something else.

 

*a mod got mildly annoyed at me

Could I have been nicer? Yeah. But you prefer blunt communication. Supposedly. And then you got pissed at me for explaining why I didn't approve this post, so I'm going to go ahead and say 'mildly annoyed' is plenty justified.

And even though I already repeated myself once in the wiggler, for the literal third time, I literally do not care if you paste the exact same original text into another location. I even suggested one. This isn't a productive way to play victim.

 

I'm holding you to a standard of behavior I'd be comfortable being held to, sure.

But oh my god, telling US to treat others the way you want to be treated? The double standards are legit killing me.

Absolutely nothing about the way you have conducted yourself gives me confidence that you came here prepared to be nice. You're polite enough until someone disagrees with you, or tries to communicate you've done harm, and then all bets are off.

And every time, every single time you misrepresent something I said in the wiggler, you're punishing me for engaging and trying to help. I was annoyed yesterday, but I'm pissed now, awesome. And still, through all this, you've been getting advice from me on how to communicate and engage with the forum. I said before that people are being impressively patient given how you've conducted yourself, and I stand by that assessment.