> "What actually happened was the behaviors intensified!" I've seen it work both ways. Sometimes, being direct about labeling and pointing out bad behavior sh

> "What actually happened was the behaviors intensified!" I've seen it work both ways. Sometimes, being direct about labeling and pointing out bad behavior shames the worst actors, and educates people who had been doing it accidentally. Other times, it simply becomes another tool for the worst actors to use -- just another way to attack. (See also: the fallacy fallacy.) In my experience, the biggest factors in whether things seem to go uphill or downhill after pointing out versions of rhetorical dodging/avoidance are: (1) does the community have good examples of people doing it right? Shaming bad behavior only works in conjunction with modeling good behavior. (This is one reason I dislike HN's hiding comment scores -- there's a visual indicator for what makes a bad comment, but no visual indicator for what makes an excellent comment. "Top comment on a post" is a fairly weak signal as it misses excellent child/grandchild/deeper comments.) (2) do the moderators have "soft power" to go with their "hard power" -- that is, are they respected enough that they can successfully ask people to change their behavior without needing to threaten a ban? (3) when the moderators (or downvotes or flags) come in, are they fair? Do they tend to target bad actors from all sides, or do they let Green Team's jerks get away with behavior that Purple Team's jerks get banned for? (4) is the community as a whole already burned out? It can be much harder to change behaviors when people stopped caring long ago. ------- If I may add more labels to your list: - "Rapid Deadline". Asking a question, making an argument, or posting a source/article and then making character attacks on opponents for having not answered even though not enough time has passed to reasonably expect answers. Or pretending like your point is agreed upon simply because it didn't get any responses in the first few minutes, and then arguing as if that point is now unassailable. This is particularly dangerous when one makes an argument that can take some time/thought/patience to respond to. (The only person I have blocked on FaceBook is an old friend who resorted to this tactic one too many times -- he'd post an article and then follow it up with insults about how I hadn't answered 3 minutes later, when the article took a good 10 minutes to read. Then he'd send private messages asking why I hadn't responded, and accusing me of cowardice.) - "Not the real position". Using reasons you don't actually believe to advocate for something, such that even if all of those reasons are shot down, there's no possibility of changing your mind because your other, secret reasons haven't been answered. - "Secret knowledge" (this might relate to your #5). Basically, you can't understand this unless you're of a particular race, gender, economic class, educational background, religion, etc. so I won't even attempt to explain it. (Often comes with statements like "check your privilege" or "alternate reality".) - "I read your post backwards." (I had someone actually say this to me once!) Really, any sort of response that treats an opposing position as meaning something completely unrelated to what it was intended to mean. The classic line-by-line response sometimes has this property -- every sentence gets responded to, but somehow all of the really important points end up getting ignored.