Published on 12, July, 2020
because of the arguments, why not hibernate?
I have done this before.
You can change your name to 'hibernating'.
It's good psychologically because it stops me from posting and indicates to others that you are having a break.
Also, you can choose to still PM (which I do) which isolates you less.
Roy has chosen to do this yesterday.
I've been told by one person that someone they knew was thinking of joining but didn't because of the disagreements, others post far less, others join and then stay a short while.
I was sad to read Billy87 s post today.
To the new people here: it's not always like this and only certain subjects are incendiary so if you can manage to avoid reading them, that would help.
I am guilty of having joined into arguments because I also feel passionately about certain subjects and I expect I will occasionally still make my point.
However, I think restraint here is the key and personal insults should never be acceptable.
I dearly hope that this thread doesn't go the same way as my 'arguments' thread and become one almightly row ...
I must admit I haven't read too many of the discussions that unfurled under that thread so maybe more than one or two did get heated again, but I at least felt like the chat string I personally had with people there was quite civil, at least to me.
Something I have found that helps is when having a disagreement to not let it get hostile is I try not to infer a tone to a piece of flat text, to remember that a lot of us have communication difficulties so not every word choice is deliberate and planned and try to bear in mind the person on the other side of the screen could be having a bad day and had they had a better day they might have phrased things more gently. And to keep ascribing motive to patterns of the person's behaviour rather than ascribe a motive right off the bat in the first interaction.
I have since found that some people I initially clashed with on this forum are alright, just imperfect people like the rest of us, less malicious and more misinformed, and we've been able to have some lovely chats when we focus on our common ground. Obvs some people will be determined not to like me for reasons that can't be helped, and for the sake of others I try to limit my interactions with those people to just saying my bit then leaving it. This has been the way I have found my feet in this forum. I'm not sure if that rocky start is par for the course now because we are a very divided society at large due to the encouraged tribalism from the powers that be, but if you can stick here long enough you do meet some lovely people and some folks who you thought you wouldn't like at first can even surprise you. I think we just have to be as warm and welcoming as we can be to new folks and hope that they will also eventually settle in.
^ I'll just edit and make this the one post rather than two.