5 ms·
"Faking nice" over "making nice" is pretty common in online communities too. 1) A person-turned-abuser sees an opportunity to abuse an undeserving bystander.
by hitekker 6y ago
"Faking nice" over "making nice" is pretty common in online communities too.
1) A person-turned-abuser sees an opportunity to abuse an undeserving bystander.
2) The abuser takes it, using polite-sounding, civil language as a smokescreen.
3) Some commenters will point out the malice in the abuser's tone.
4) The abuser furiously spams the thread, claiming clear & good intentions. The abuser may even pretend to apologize to the abused.
5) Months later, the abuser only remembers "both sides were wrong" or the abused "kind of deserved it"
The relevant quote is "Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed." If a person offends the group's vague sense of manners, that person risks being condemned and ostracized. But if a person can cloak their action under a thin veneer of respectability (propriety), they can do quite a bit, even harm a fellow human being, without being detected.
- waterhouse 6y agoQuite possible. Though, playing devil's advocate, I wonder if requiring propriety still manages to filter out the majority of bad actors. I certainly see a decent number of commenters who are clearly rude and not making an effort to cover it, whose comments wouldn't pass muster even if they weren't rude, and getting modded away. (There's also some amount of rudeness that looks reasonable to the political tribe being rude, which generally remains in place; it's hard to establish objective-seeming norms around this so I'll set that aside.) Lastly, I can think of only one recognizable commenter who I'm pretty sure was acting like a deliberate troll on a few occasions: starting out with what I'm pretty sure he knew was a straw man argument, and then using his rhetorical skill to just mess with the people arguing back, rather than making a coherent point.