After various conflicts in the forum's history, our own respective life experiences, and most recently the bad opinion thread brought up that it's freaking difficult to step out of or pause conflicts. Emotional investment makes it hard to feel like we don't need to resolve things now, feeling like our feelings are being dismissed makes it harder, and worrying that the conversation will go on without us makes it harder still. One method used in a lot of online communities is the presence of many active moderators, who will respond to reports quickly, freezing threads as they believe is necessary, and even using bans. Our mods are few and inconsistently available, so there's no guarantee that threads will be quickly frozen. And, honestly, I'm not convinced that it's an effective strategy. Hurt and angry people with a frozen thread will continue feeling hurt and angry and may express it in other places: starting new threads, vaguing (or not so vaguing) in vent threads, or just pming people. Playing whack-a-mole with the more determined, and IP banning only works if the people involved aren't using proxies. The more reliable solution is for the people involved in the fight to agree to pause, believing that the others will actually pause and that the conversation will continue again so they'll still have the chance to be heard. So, the question: Can we design scripts for signaling that we want to put a conflict on pause?
I agree that freezing a thread isn't always a good solution and that a better solution would be the individuals in an escalating conflict agreeing to step back until they can proceed in a manner less likely to devolve into a fight (as opposed to an argument). But I don't think I understand how designing "scripts for signalling that we want to put a conflict on pause" would encourage people to do that/agree to step back when someone else is doing it, or maybe I don't understand what you mean by it. Could you elaborate?
A lot of us are not great at words, and especially not when we're upset. It's easy to mean to say "this is a fight, causing harm, and this is a really good time to pause," but say something that has no effect... or escalates further.
So, a set phrase that people can use and other people can recognise as nothing more than a request to put the conversation on hold (until the speaker is in a better frame of mind to continue)? Kind of like a safe word? That makes sense. I can see how that could avoid some pitfalls that non-scripted requests occasionally run into. I don't have any suggestions but I think this is definitely an idea worth exploring so I'm going to keep tabs on this thread.
@Elaienar it also helps when certain phrases tend to upset people more, even if they're well meant! like...having a set "safe script" will sorta build the association of "I mean that this is a fight, causing harm, and this is a good time to pause", where something that might seem like it would might not? does...shit my phrasing is all wonky YET ANOTHER GOOD REASON FOR SCRIPTS (@swirlingflight this is a rly good idea thank you so much)
So like... "witnessed" but meaning shorthand for "please hold my brain is doing the angries and I need to Not right now", if I am following correctly? I am not sure I am conveying properly the thing, but. It makes sense to me to make the reference to witnessed on this forum as a word-thing and have other word-things like it. Yes. Word-things. Good job communicating, me. Such articulate. Much express.
This, this is the thread I was looking for. I half-remembered it existed but not what it was called and was hoping it was still relatively recent in the pages. In light of no comments since my previous one, I want to suggest... just, "please hold". If that's not dumb. I mean I want to suggest it even if it is kinda dumb but I am way down for something better to be suggested.
