What is WP for?

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Hmm, sometimes I like to kind of bring up the opposite extreme in discussions, not to annoy people but it's just a personality thing. Like during covid, I sometimes brought up forgotten but common viruses like flu and norovirus, just to remind people that they still existed and that they can have a bad affect on people too.

I think getting hung up on a detail in an OP, like a word they used or something, and turning the whole thread into a discussion about that one word, is a good example of derailment. For example, if you used a word that's not familiar to Americans, it's annoying when the people in the thread get so hung up on that one word and veers the discussion away on to it completely instead of just Googling it.

It's just the conversation flows.

If I'm at work or out socialising and I start off on a topic I can't expect to stay on that same topic all night. I couldn't even expect that the end of the conversation would even remotely link up to the start of the conversation.

Maybe some people expect the flow of their threads to not work like a normal conversation. Maybe some people expect to only talk about warm weather in a thread. That wouldn't work for me personally because my brain doesn't work that way.

Yes that is a good example and it's annoying when that happens. Or turning it into a discussion about how the OP phrased their question instead of actually answering the question.

Or a more obvious derailment would be if I was asking for advice about what to do in hot weather, and people came along talking about bitcoin and how to win on the lottery. Now that would be derailment.

Or if they started talking about sex. We've had some members who manage to make everything adult.

Yes. Something happened in a thread of mine a few weeks ago. The person just posted a random word in the middle of a conversation. I'm not all that bothered about these things personally but this person is quite well known for having a zero tolerance attitude towards these things themselves so I thought it was quite hypocritical. I managed to get them to have a more productive input in the thread in the end.

I think some people are literally controlled by the moon sometimes.

Ah yes, that's annoying. Sex is very seldom on my mind so I don't really want to read replies in my threads that are too sexual, unless the thread is intended to be about sex. One time I posted a thread in the women's discussion about women's problems and the whole thread was overtaken by men discussing dirty things about sex. I'm not saying all men here do that, and I don't have anything against men replying in the women's discussion if they know how to be a gentleman and keep to the topic instead of going off on sexual tangents. I felt so embarrassed, that I had to ask one of the mods to lock the thread before any more dirty off-topic posts got added.


Yes that's also what I meant.

In practice this issue has never really been a left v. right issue and the exact make-up of who engages in it has shifted over time. The departure of posters prone to this behaviour has had somewhat of an ideological bias so there's likely the opposite tendency among those who are still here who are prone to it.

It also seems to be more tied to personality traits than politics; the same people who appear to do it along political lines are often pretty quick to do it to posters they'd otherwise be considered more closely aligned with whenever they notice they hold mutually critical positions.

We can't say it's a matter of being more sensitive to toxic behaviour or ToS violations either because many of those posters give it as good at they get it, so to speak.

Like you say, it seems like taking a dive. It's performative and doesn't actually contribute to better enforcement of rules because the goal isn't actually to improve enforcement, it's just to distort enforcement.

At risk of giving away a mod secret, sometimes “this discussion is getting off topic, perhaps stick to the topic at hand” is a gentle, indirect way of putting an end to hostile behaviour, rather than actually being about something being off-topic. It’s particularly useful when:

- the behaviour isn’t severe enough to warrant a warning, but still needs to be stopped

- there isn’t clearly a single party at fault, and either party could be aggrieved at the insinuation that they were partly to blame

Pointing out that a particular discussion is off-topic is a more “neutral” option that doesn’t cast blame, but still indicates that the current (hostile) conversation needs to end.

Yes this is an autism forum and so we’ll generally try to be explicit without being accusatory, but sometimes that just isn’t necessary.

This doesn’t apply to every discussion that has been given as an example, but it is one technique for defusing a tense situation.

I generally don’t think threads should “belong” to the person who created them unless they are either clearly personal or have largely been maintained by one person. General “discussion” topics where lots of people have weighed in belong to everyone and no-one, in my view.

I have noticed a few posts along the lines of “I see the usual suspects are derailing this” recently. Those posts are generally worse than the posts they are complaining about, and if they are made with malicious intent then it is counter-productive as they just cause me to be irritated with the person making them.

Given how literal thinking tends to be a common trait here, perhaps something analogous but more precise might be useful when the issue isn't things going off-topic but instead posters just being too snarky, exchanging too many barbs, etc.

I agree about sparing posters feelings but at the same time when there's multiple parties engaging in it they all bear responsibility for things continuing. If nothing more than correction is being sought any feelings of grievance can be diffused by reminding them the goal wasn't to punish who started it, just to get the participants to knock if off.

Or they turn everything into chatting people up, as if it's a dating agency around here. That definitely happens on social media, ugh!

Yes, if I wrote 'I like the green coat that Madonna was wearing to that fashion show' and people commented 'that coat wasn't green', 'that wasn't a coat', 'that was a business meeting, not a fashion show'

Honestly!

I do expect threads on a message board to be more topic-focused than ordinary conversation. Doesn't mean they can't digress at all, but, IMO, they should remain at least somewhat related to the original topic.

When I click on a thread title, I expect to see discussion relevant to the topic indicated by the title.

The way my mind works, I strongly prefer focused discussion. Random chit chat is much harder for me to get into.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 05 Sep 2022, 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd say it depends on the specifics of how these other issues get discussed. For example, it seems to me that "a discussion about how the OP phrased their question" is okay if it doesn't go on for too long, and if it results in the OP re-phrasing the question in a way that's clearer and gets better answers than it could have gotten otherwise. On the other hand, if the OP's wording gets discussed at length, in a way that doesn't actually clarify anything relevant to the main topic but is just an excuse for other people to talk about their own pet peeves, that's a derailment.

Given that the Hunter Biden laptop controversy is a highly contentious topic in and of itself, it makes perfect sense to me to put that debate in a separate thread.

To me it seems best to have no more than one highly contentious topic per thread. If topic A depends on topic B for context, then posts in thread A could contain links to relevant posts in thread B, instead of making arguments on topic B directly.

That seems like a rather fragmented approach to conversation. Why not let the topic evolve in an organic way?

Everything is related to some degree. It's foolish to think otherwise.

Well, instead of talking about the topic at hand it often turns into a “discussion” that’s already going on in another thread. The OP should be able to explore the subject that they broached in their initial post without it turning into an off-topic argument.

This is less of a problem in fun, lighthearted threads, I think. It’s more of an issue in serious threads.