I believe that one of the reasons people are boring and/or irritating is that they don’t know good ways of getting attention. However, being clever or reassuring or whatever might adequately repay attention isn’t necessarily easy. Could it be made easier?
I wonder how far a community interested in solving the “boring/irritating people” problem could get by creating a forum whose stated purpose was to respond in an engaged, attentive way to anything anyone posts there. It could be staffed by certified volunteers who were trained in techniques of nonviolent communication and committed to continuing to engage with anyone who posted there, for as long as they chose to keep doing so, and nobody but staff would be permitted to reply to posters.
Perhaps giving them easier-to-obtain attention will cause them to leave other forums where attention requires being clever or reassuring or similarly difficult valuable tings.
I’m inclined to doubt it, though.
I am somewhat tangentially reminded of a “suicide hotline” (more generally, a “call us if you’re having trouble coping” hotline) where I went to college, which had come to the conclusion that they needed to make it more okay to call them, get people in the habit of doing so, so that people would use their service when they needed it. So they explicitly started the campaign of “you can call us for anything. Help on your problem sets. The Gross National Product of Kenya. The average mass of an egg. We might not know, but you can call us anyway.” (This was years before the Web, let alone Google, of course.)
I believe that one of the reasons people are boring and/or irritating is that they don’t know good ways of getting attention. However, being clever or reassuring or whatever might adequately repay attention isn’t necessarily easy. Could it be made easier?
(nods) Thank you.
I wonder how far a community interested in solving the “boring/irritating people” problem could get by creating a forum whose stated purpose was to respond in an engaged, attentive way to anything anyone posts there. It could be staffed by certified volunteers who were trained in techniques of nonviolent communication and committed to continuing to engage with anyone who posted there, for as long as they chose to keep doing so, and nobody but staff would be permitted to reply to posters.
Perhaps giving them easier-to-obtain attention will cause them to leave other forums where attention requires being clever or reassuring or similarly difficult valuable tings.
I’m inclined to doubt it, though.
I am somewhat tangentially reminded of a “suicide hotline” (more generally, a “call us if you’re having trouble coping” hotline) where I went to college, which had come to the conclusion that they needed to make it more okay to call them, get people in the habit of doing so, so that people would use their service when they needed it. So they explicitly started the campaign of “you can call us for anything. Help on your problem sets. The Gross National Product of Kenya. The average mass of an egg. We might not know, but you can call us anyway.” (This was years before the Web, let alone Google, of course.)