Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.