For what it’s worth—I had one exchange with the person in question pretty early on, decided based on their response that the conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere useful, and dropped it.
But I mostly refrained from downvoting them initially because there were people I respected who were continuing the discussion with every indication that it was being productive, and I value productive discussion even if I’m not getting anything out of it personally. (There are a lot of exchanges on this site that kinda sound like gibberish to me, and in at least some cases I’m fairly confident that this is because I don’t understand the issue well enough to participate usefully in the discussion even as an observer, not because the participants are in fact spouting gibberish.)
After a very short while I stopped reading any of the comments on that thread except to sample them every once in a while to see if they were going anywhere, and it seemed pretty clear that they weren’t. At that point I started downvoting everyone involved on the grounds that I want less high-volume discussion that makes no progress.
In the cases where you believe people are talking gibberish, I’d suggest adding a comment saying that you’re confused.
It lets people know which topics people find confusing. And if you’re lucky you might get some links to background material which will help things make sense.
I do that sometimes, but in general only when I’m prepared to dedicate some effort to making sense of an explanation, should someone provide one. “I’m confused, and choose to stay that way for now” seems like an inane thing to say.
For what it’s worth—I had one exchange with the person in question pretty early on, decided based on their response that the conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere useful, and dropped it.
But I mostly refrained from downvoting them initially because there were people I respected who were continuing the discussion with every indication that it was being productive, and I value productive discussion even if I’m not getting anything out of it personally. (There are a lot of exchanges on this site that kinda sound like gibberish to me, and in at least some cases I’m fairly confident that this is because I don’t understand the issue well enough to participate usefully in the discussion even as an observer, not because the participants are in fact spouting gibberish.)
After a very short while I stopped reading any of the comments on that thread except to sample them every once in a while to see if they were going anywhere, and it seemed pretty clear that they weren’t. At that point I started downvoting everyone involved on the grounds that I want less high-volume discussion that makes no progress.
No general lesson here, just another data point.
In the cases where you believe people are talking gibberish, I’d suggest adding a comment saying that you’re confused.
It lets people know which topics people find confusing. And if you’re lucky you might get some links to background material which will help things make sense.
I do that sometimes, but in general only when I’m prepared to dedicate some effort to making sense of an explanation, should someone provide one. “I’m confused, and choose to stay that way for now” seems like an inane thing to say.