Hard to have a genuine discussion with anyone throwing fallacies around.
I’m not familiar with eye rolls being given by that user in response to anything but tired old saws.
Which fallacy would that be?
I’ll try to remember to keep you posted the next time it happens, then, because it happens a lot.
The standard we’ve been applying for “contentless” is a pretty straightforward one: “Does it add to the overall discussion to be there?”
If a post has an eyeroll gif and nothing else and is flagged, there is a high probability it will be considered offtopic. However, very few posts are actually flagged like that, because most gifs that are posted are in addition to comments from the poster. That also obviously doesn’t include gifs that contain text that is the message or gifs that are actually part of the conversation (i.e., someone mentions bunnies and someone responds with a bunny gif).
As the guidelines say, these aren’t hard and fast rules on purpose. But the standard is pretty simple: “Would one feel that this post adds to the conversation by being here with this image and nothing else”?
One last thing to consider: there are a few visually impaired users of the BBS (I know this because I’ve spoken with them about screenreader issues here and for Boing Boing proper), and that probably means there are even more lurkers not posting - so including text with your gif is likely a good idea on that note alone.
We all know that subtleties are not the strength of non-in-person communications, so you are better off clarifying your intent than not, anyway.
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Sometimes it is, I think, though. do we really need to reinterrogate ideas such as white supremacy, male supremacy, or the earth is flat? Not everyone deserves our attention or time, not all ideas are equally valid.
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Again, not all points are worth giving genuine discussions about. And often, the person that gets the gif, etc, is responding to us and demanding OUR time (not always of course).
And again, why do YOU get to decide how the rest of us communicate here. Why is YOUR view about gifs and the like more correct that ours?
Besides that…
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I don’t, and I haven’t. I get to make suggestions, which I’ve done. The mods/admins get to decide because it’s their site.
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It makes it harder for you to have the kind of discussion you like to have.
For me (and others), snarky gifs are just another mode of communication.
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The one she eyerolled. Or I did?
Whichever one you care to point out, really.
And the correct response in that case is to not engage with those persons or ideas to which you feel are undeserving of attention, thereby depriving them of the inertia required to carry on the discussion.
Topics sputter and flame out because they are no longer receiving attention, not because a hundred rebuttals were made about a topic ”no one” wants to discuss. We’ve seen that occur here in recent memory.
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But then then they might not be made aware of how little attention they are being paid
This could be a whole new internet if you accomplish this. Count me in. I am all for personal responsibility in communications. (between puns and jokes and memes)
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Nobody here demands anyones time. When I have even begun to think this, I mute someone. That’s the tool at our disposal, not character assassination until compliance is achieved.
I wasn’t talking about a specific eyeroll in a current thread, if that’s what you’re saying.
you did seem to be asking about a specific fallacy.
which is why i asked about that. I can see you’ve take that to mean a specific eyeroll? Not my intent. I was asking you if you were referring to a specific fallacy. Only that. 
Okay. I though you were saying I was throwing fallacies around. If not, then we’re cool.
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Nah. I am one to respond to repeatedly stated fallacies with snarky gifs, though. If you ever get the sense I may be implying that of you, do ask! I might be at some other time and place, but I am darned unlikely to be coy about it or approach it from an angle, if so.
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I can’t agree with this more. Some of the posters who come in on the wrong, I mean different, sides of some debates are not just driving trollies; you can be wrong but well-meaning even on issues where it seems that just contemplating a second POV is automatically offensive.
Responding to a post with an image like an eyeroll might feel to such a person like a pretty aggressive act of derision, even if the eyeroller doesn’t really mean it that way. We should behave better than that, especially to other people who have been in the community for more than an hour. Unless that is the intent, why not just not post?
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Textless eyerolls may be communication, but they’re not discussion. Which, I think, was Orenwolf’s point.
I’ve got nothing against actually funny interjections, or with telling off someone who’s being a gigantic douchenozzle. If your preferred way to communicate with anyone who disagrees with you is aggressive brush-offs, that’s your prerogative, but you shouldn’t be surprised that it irritates the people around you.
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And coming into a community and throwing racist, sexist, homophobic comments is not? Or constantly skirting the rules to get away with acts of driving trollies? But a fucking gif is “aggressive”? Really?
That’s just the politics of respectability, that I should only be respected if I act a particular way that the men around here have agreed is “respectable.” Nah. Sorry.
And let’s not forget how many bad faith posters managed to hang around for years, who contributed nothing meaningful to our conversations. Or all those commenters who make an account and then let it stick around for a couple of years, and then come back and make trollish comments.
It’s not that simple.
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