Hey, my offer for us to get some waffles some time still stands!
I do not lightly joke about delicious breakfast desert-meals, they are kind of the only reason to get up before noon on the weekends…
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Oh IIIIIII seeeeeeee. Reddit is a hate group?
Wow. That is an interesting opinion.
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That’s a pretty interesting reading of me referring to a specific subreddit KiA, which absolutely is a hate group dedicated to harassment. Did you hurt your back twisting to get to that reading?
Wow bro. You call other people hateful, and then isult someone for even trying to understand you?
Did I ask you “Reddit is a hate group?” OR did I ask you if “you strained any muscles posturing”?
I asked the former, you apparently read the latter.
The ‘hateful people on the internet’ issue… i think you (your approach, your false assertions of other peoples positions, and your quickness to insult and demean) are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution.
Insulting is fine. Making up enemies to insult, that is not so… useful. Although I recall righteousness is, in the end, it’s own reward. Righteousness is not… a community building tool.
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If you wanted to ask an honest question about my opinion to clarify, you should have done so. You shouldn’t have asked it rhetorically and sarcastically, and then commented on what you thought my opinion was. Don’t go pretending you meant that as an honest question. You have constantly been driving trollies across several threads, and even told to leave me alone by a moderator, but apparently you have no desire to stop being an ass.
What enemies am I making up, here? In what ways am I not being honest?
You shouldn’t have read it sarcastically and as rhetoric. But AGAIN you label my intent. That is your lie.
There is a vast difference between me saying ‘I believe this is your opinion, am I correct, because that would be an interesting opinion.’
And you saying “someone IS a hateful member of a hate group”
But maybe they’re the same to you? Maybe aggressive and assertive are things you don’t know the difference between?
It might be illuminating to google aggressive v. assertive communication.
tl;dr (assertive = “I am”; aggressive “you are”)
You honestly don’t see how someone could maybe read this as sarcastic? Really?
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ADMIN NOTE: Order in the blog comments. Knock off the personal bickering.
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(Sidebar: searching through Judge Judy animated gifs is a solid three minutes of entertainment)
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I meant by the moderators - not the users. 17 of the 50 defaults, and close to 100 subreddits total shut down during AMAgeddon. But you are still technically correct about vocal minority overwhelming everything, and using smoke and mirrors to make it appear wholesale. I would guess most users of reddit, on the whole, are lurkers, and never even comment - much less know who Victoria or Alexis or Ellen are.
I absolutely agree, which was what my insta-EDIT is about, added directly after my initial post. “Clearing out the garbage” referring to the heinous and disruptive subreddits that were shut down. But I’m also not sure what you mean by she has a different side of the story. Could you clarify? As far as I read,
[quote]Pao wrote that she was leaving Reddit, which attracted more than 163 million visitors last month, because the “board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles”.
[/quote]
Which is what I was saying here
and what a lot of people theorized was the reasoning behind Victoria being let go.
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I honestly do. I honestly don’t see how responding to sarcasm with sarcasm elevates the debate and makes the internet a nicer place. I honestly resorted to it.
When it’s me using bad manners to point out bad manners it’s not okay.
When it’s another user i will not mention, in an attempt to end the personal bickering, well in that case using bad manners to point out an admin users bad manners… is cool.
I just tire of the double standards. So I do try to illuminate them. I do wish people would focus more on their own behavior, and less on the character flaws of people they’ve never met. Sometimes people are just offering them a taste of their own medicine.
I tend to support the idea of banning hateful subreddits, but a person who assumed I didn’t because of my ‘tone’, or because I disagree with their logic as stated? I don’t really mind if they jump to such conclusions. Making mistakes is how one learns to not jump so far and so fast.
–edits in this paragraph–
Telling people what they are ‘effectively’ saying… is not communication and it is propaganda. Telling people you feel dismissed because you interpret their words to mean XXX but you’d like to ask them if that’s a fair interpretation first… that’s communication. We all do our best. I’d rather not be labeled in the process of conversation. It’s rude and justifying it because your friends (a third party) are hurt by a fourth party to the conversation at hand… it is not helpful to anyone. It’s derailing.
But when i derail a conversation… it’s suddenly not cool anymore. 
It can serve that way. But the resulting communities are… rather lousy to have around, whatever their goals are.
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This was their first comment to you in the thread… Pointing out that people, they know, who have been victimized by people who organized on reddit.
Followed by this comment. It’s indeed a snarky comment. But when you’re constantly being told (not by you, but by lots of others), how harassment isn’t a problem, when it’s impacting people’s lives negatively, perhaps you can understand how someone might get frustrated by constantly being shut down and ignored? You seem to be completely ignoring the problem, and dismissing it as unimportant. Maybe that’s not what you meant, but given the history of this long, ongoing set of events related to reddit, perhaps you can emphathize a bit and maybe try to understand where @dragonchild12 is coming from.
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frustration, yes! Dealing with those feelings by externalizing them as ‘first comment’? NOPE.
You seem to be telling me I am thinking something (in this case, not thinking), and you are not asking me my opinion on the overall issue. (I was asking the other users opinion, not stating it for him /her to disagree with, albeit I postulated a possible interpretation but I think it was not me telling them ‘they only could be interpreted this one way’, and then calling that person disagreeable).
Do you want to know someones opinion? because assuming what it probably is and then telling that person that they appear to feel a way, and only one way, about a thing is one of the many ways to find out their actual opinion.
And I find it to be the most aggressive, least empathetic way to find it out.
Maybe there is nuance here I am failing to express? But the internal locus of control vs. external seems to be part of what i am getting at, and how hard it can be to validate an external locus of control for someone else. I mean no offense and don’t think less of anyone for their opinions. Just their behaviors.
Thank you for the advice on empathy. That is not sarcasm.
Okay, I have no idea what you’re thinking, but your comments seem to suggest you’re not thinking that the issues @dragonchild12 is concerned about are worth being concerned about. If that’s not what you think, you should say so.
So, tell us your opinion on the harassment committed by some members of reddit, then. What about the firing of Ellen Pao?
My defense of @dragonchild12 comes, in part from seeing real problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, in our society and constantly being told that if we get mad, we’re in the wrong, that the real problem in society is not not these things, which have real world consequences for the people who experience them, but for the people we’re supposedly “censoring” for pointing out that they are being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, what have you.
I have experienced this (with regards to sexism) myself, and told that what I experienced wasn’t real. Being patted on the head and told to let the men tell me how I should feel is really demeaning and humiliating. Can you understand how we might be sick of this sort of treatment and feel a bit knee-jerk about it when people tell us that it’s all in our heads, yet again, or that we’re not being “nice” enough?
Good. I’m glad. I hope you understand I’m attempting to discuss this in good faith with you. Because I am.
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If that’s what you think, you might ask. But I see you dare again to should me. Very non aggressive communication. I’ll volunteer that if asked I’d be glad to say. If dared to wear a smear against my character until I clarify… well, no.
How ever could I have misunderstood the users later comment in light of this one?
This I understand. Deeply. Maybe we should have a thread on conversation styles sometime? But not here, I’m getting out of here. 
While I can understand why this was an overstatement, do you understand where it’s coming from? Is it an overstatement? Yes. I know some fine folks who spend time on reddit. Did reddit constantly allow pretty horrific things to be said on their site, some of which spilled over into meat space in pretty egregious ways? Yes, that’s true too. Again, when one is constantly told that “free speech” trumps my ability to defend myself, I think this constitutes a problem.
I’d again say that @dragonchild12’s comments, while wrong, comes from a place of anger and frustration, so perhaps you can understand it a bit, and maybe say that you understand, even if you disagree with the extent of the comment?
Am I dumb, cause I can’t seem to parse this sentence… did you mean something else other than should?
[ETA] Also, we should probably admit the utter limitations of this communications medium. Even with the best of animated gifs, talking outside of face to face can miss some clues found in non-verbal communications.
Totally do. Can you understand that it comes across that you’re entitled to my opinion? Because you might be, if you ask for it. I don’t owe anyone a smile, right? No more than you do.
I think the root of a lot of the very issues (and watch me bring this back on topic, because it is) which leads redditors to making and piling on such hatefests as Pao endured, comes from making a lot of assumptions about others. Nothing wrong with assumptions per se, there are so many contexts where doing so keeps one safer. I’m not sure making those assumptions in internet chat rooms are one of those contexts.
And to not be a dick, because clearly you’d like to know more or less: How do I think sexism, homophobia, etc… factor in? I think those are your lenses. I validate them! But that’s how I think they factor in. I have mine. Your sexism explanations fit through my sieve. We are allies, even though I may not always seem it, it’s the anger I oppose. Fear is the mind killer.
My reductionist approach to all those problems can fail to validate someones immediate experiences of things - and it is nice that you notice I don’t tend to invalidate other peoples personal experiences when shared - but again, I was being asked to consider how tough it is for someones friends, not how tough it is for someone.
So if I am told I fail to show empathy to a third party properly, I have to ask if you have ever been gaslit? to clarify: I don’t think -you- are doing this. I think you’re asking me to be more considerate towards someone who is telling me I fail to show empathy to their put-upon friends. I don’t think I am reading into anything to read it that way.
Jesus, I’ve had two very real stalkers, threats of violence, creepy ‘bunny boiling’ incidents, and moved 5 times in 5 years. Much of it has been online, but not the same as the crap people have had to deal with for just stating their opinions and angering misogynist fuckwits. But cry me a river about how hard life can be when other people in it are being harassed. Thank you for listening!
I only meant that I find it daring when someone tells me which opinions of mine i ‘‘should’’ be telling them, for free! I mean, it might help them out, but how am I supposed to guess which of my opinions needs to be trotted out. Isn’t me trotting out so many opinions annoying enough?
should vs. could.
Aggressive vs. assertive.
if you ask, then maybe i should. If you don’t ask, then maybe i could.
I think the difference is much much more than ‘tone’.
(lets have a thread sometime)
