Doesn’t happen. I think you underestimate the number of posters here.
Doesn’t happen. Flagging has not decreased with the introduction of the ignore feature.
Also: moderators are notified when users are ignored by a large number of other users, to allow us to take appropriate action.
There is literally no other medium I can think of where this is true. You can walk away from someone at a party you don’t want to talk to. Or on the street, or in your group of friends, or on any of the social media platforms.
This mindset strikes me as one that would arise from never being the subject of online harassment or bullying.
I’ll make it clear: there is no fucking way we would ever force through a technical measure, policy, ”peer pressure”, etc. people to read or be forced to respond to others comments. Do you read anything posted on Boing Boing? About the number of people who are hounded and harassed and are unable to escape those who would harass others, label them as ”toxic” to a community, be intentionally contrarian just to stir the pot, or any number of folks who just want to disrupt the place.
For many, many people, posting inline isn’t a social experiment. It’s a place where choosing to share personal information about themselves, be it beliefs, gender identity, political affiliation or any number of other triggers that may lead to both the mental anguish of bullying or disparagement in those same online spaces, or worse, real-world targeting by asshats.
We will not contribute to that here. This is a moderated forum where everyone has a right to speak. No one has a right to be read. Just like every other public forum, I can think of.
This topic was started from a discussion of how to surface unpopular positions or statements in a way that they can be read and responded to instead of ignored or buried under a wall of disagreement. I said at the beginning that I did not believe there was a technological fix to this phenomenon, but I sure as shit know the solution isn’t to force people to read and respond to comments.
