On Mar 28, 2019, at 12:03 PM, Adrian Farrel <adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > (I guess I should start with "This is not an attack" :o) Wouldn’t help, but thanks. :) > What you have said is only somewhat true. > > If you substitute for "flaming" something like "touching inappropriately" or "punching" then you can see how it is not the receiver who is always to blame. > > Of course, you also have some very good points that I encourage readers to think about. Sometimes in order to get to the point where one is motivated to take corrective action, one must receive feedback from a moderator or ombudsteam. I am not suggesting that we must accept every communication that is offered, no matter how unpleasant or ill-intended. I was addressing the other side of the problem: if you are interested in not being an jerk online, how do you actually accomplish that, and not try and fail over and over again. Speaking to my own experience, the reason I kept saying things that made matters worse was that I was trying to express myself politely, but still mentally framing the conversation wrong. No matter how I expressed what I intended to express, it was received as an attack, because my model of the conversation was adversarial. I still do this, just less often. It’s a difficult habit to get out of. When I see the conversation as cooperative, then how polite I am is not a very big issue, because it was never my intention to be impolite—that wasn’t the thing I was doing wrong, although it may in many cases have appeared that way. What I think is often missed in these discussions is that the person who can clearly be seen as causing the problem can be just as motivated to solve it as the ombudsteam, but without an understanding of how the problem is happening, there is no way for them to solve it.
