One thing that would help is not so much a focus on individuals as a couple of specific behaviors that keep coming up a whole lot when people get riled up.
In particular, once things get firey we have people replying to people without reading/bothering to digest the post they’re replying to, and instead simply grabbing a sentence to reply to and regurgitating the same point they started with. This ends up creating huge cycles of essentially useless conversation and frustrating everyone involved.
A fresh example of it is here: Freedom: a #blacklivesmatter anthem
It happens WAY before people get frustrated and is really obvious when it happens, but it’s not necessarily crossing a line so we can’t really do anything about it.
If we could get a public warning when a topic was potentially/was getting ‘heated’ that it was time to raise the bar that we could all refer back to then a lot of these issues wouldn’t escalate and we wouldn’t have so many otherwise interesting conversations getting derailed and/or ending prematurely.
It’d require a second tier of rules, but that shouldn’t be too hard to put together and there are examples of the same put together in debate forums and such online.
