> Also you have the right to check their papers, as in to demand they prove to you their commitments and beliefs, and their unwillingness to do so on demand is a sign of culpability too.
It's funny but points to a fundamental reason I got off social media. In healthy relationships, you can (healthily) infer a lot in a conversation because you have invested in getting to know the other individual. I can say things like, "You know I wouldn't agree with that," and I don't need to offer up dozens of pieces of evidence to prove it.
The flame wars were funny even back then, they were exaggerated conflicts, I never thought people took them seriously. Nowadays, instagram, twitters, fb? The rage on these platforms is unbeliveable! Forum-based flamewars usually had multi-paragraph detailed rants on why such and such was incorrect and why "my" way was "so much better". The modern version is one sentence sound-bites _at most_!
The internet was better when it was smaller, but maybe that's the way it is with anything.
Should we...have a flame war just for old times' sake? Kidding aside, I grew up on BBSes, so small online places is my comfort zone too.
If its any consolation, IMHO the internet has started its next seismic shift: final destruction of the world wide web's rotting corpse. There's no telling where we all end up next. Small communities could make a comeback if we really want them. Exciting times!
In theory it should be possible to say this as a shorthand to "we do not share the same values", but of course in practice these discussions get emotional really fast.
This recent one comes to mind, note how the author takes a lot of precautions around it, but still...
One of my favorite parts of the Death Stranding (before my overtaxed attention span led to me abandoning it for another game) was that "Likes" were the actual currency in the world
> People who don’t like tech corporations are good targets for this too; they should build their movements through communicating by cuneiform tablet on clay harvested from local mudbanks;
Funny, considering how much she complained about tech (in particular, shuttles) after selling her house to a Googler in the mission.
Congrats for demonstrating her point (which was that commenters often claim that anyone who ever benefitted from tech in any way must not criticize tech).
My grief was, of course, more meta - I’m merely criticizing her criticizing people who criticized her - so don’t criticize me about it.
My real beef was about how things went down. She sold her apartment, checked into the brutal reality of bay area housing in 2012, and then wrote a bunch about how terrible it all was because prices went up and rentals were hyper competitive.
To be fair, it was all terrible, but it was hard to have sympathy for a former homeowner selling in a booming market.
N. Remember that you can (almost) always accuse anyone of sealioning, and if they try to respond in any way, this will prove that they are sealioning. This is infinitely more worthwhile than simply not responding any more (which is of course all you want them to do), and you'll feel great [0].
N+1. Be sure to let people know that you are blocking them, before blocking them. It's not enough of a deterrent to know that one can be blocked, so it is very important that you ensure people know that they are being blocked. Depending on the social media in question, it can be important to get these steps in the correct order.
[0] for example, this entire snarky comment can be accused of sealioning, and even that level of meta-sealioning won't provide the author with any escape. It's like a rhetorical klein bottle: you will never know what is and what isn't covered by the definition, and any attempt to discuss that is covered by the definition.
For N it works just as well when you accuse anybody of "hostility" or "aggression." The words themselves mean nothing but you pre-emptively frame anything they respond with as something negative.
"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to watch their posts get heavily downvoted."
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