If you are thinking of leaving the forum ...

I've been hibernating on and off for a year and a half. I have noticed a general downer on the forum this last year, debates turn hostile at the drop off a hat and it's very upsetting. Equally upsetting that some members have left and are leaving now. 6 months ago we had a good group of members, everyone was mostly happy and since then things have got bad and some members have died, others have left and more often than not there are arguments on the forum.

I am considering leaving. Not just because of the arguments but a lot of the people I knew are no longer here and it's lost that warm and fun feel to it.

I don't know if ad hominem is the right term but we have a lot of debates that go like this:

OP: I did X and a bad thing happened, give me advice.

A: X is a horrible thing to do, you should never do X.

B: Well actually I think X can be ok to do sometimes and if the OP does X and Y things might turn out better.

A: No you and the OP are horrible people X is never acceptable and you both deserve to have bad things happen to you.

What we want are discussions like this

OP: I did X and a bad thing happened, give me advice.

A: Well I think X is counter productive I think you should try Y instead.

B: Actually I think X might be ok if he did Z as well.

A: But X and Z raise several ethical concerns for me. Specifically A, B and C. 

Ah I see, you mean the ad hominem falacy? (Spellchecker failed this morning, that may be spelled wrong.)

Even I am not for speech without consequence. You know I'm generally against defamation for example. But I think for us to maintain civility we need to avoid turning our attacks on peoples arguments into attacks on the people themselves.

Well on the surface level I'd agree with you Peter, but the issue with the concept of wanting free speeach on the forum is that actually we already have it here, nobody is physically stopped from saying anything here, what they are not free from is the consequences of what they say. You can't mind control people to be okay with whatever is said, because they too have a right to an opinon and also exercise their own free speach to say so.
It's true namecalling is not helpful or necesssary but as I pointed out last night that is what mods are for to bring things back to a civil and safe level when things go too far, I think you should utilise the ability to point out if you think rules have been broken to them.

P.s. Hope you did actually get some rest last night, this morning I did read what you last sent me lastnight, but I've not responded there because it seemed to have come to a end of sorts.

That's true. But part of that is accepting that people can say things that you hate, that make your blood boil, and that you're going to respond to the point, and the arguments, but not attack the person. It's accepting that you can contradict opinions you don't like but you can't silence them or vilanize people for having them.

^ I'll just edit and make this the one post rather than two.

This is great advice.

I use other forums online and i can definitely agree that choosing what posts you interact with makes a difference to how positive or negative your experience with it will be. You get what you give, so they say. 

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.

Thank you, Debbie. Hibernating is a good temporary solution rather than leaving the forum for good. This is a safe space and good resource for people on the spectrum. Sometimes things can get out of hand but ordinarily it is a good calm environment.

I'm pretty new and haven't been on much for a bit because life is hectic, so I've not seen what you're referring to - but this is a little worrying. I hope that things smooth out and whatnot, because this is such a nice space to exist for us. 

Another thing I've been pondering on.

I used to be on a stock photography forum and that decended into rows too.

In that instance, it was because of large egos quite often.

Here, it's very different.

We have a set of people who all have vulnerabilities and quite often, have suffered at the hands of others.

Therefore, when subjects come up such as *ex and gender/gender roles, these can be triggers and can end up in conflict and I think can be quite harmful to the people involved.

We all have very different experiences of life, are different in many different ways, but perhaps rather than going the way of the outside world's wars, we can try to learn to get along, in spite of these differences.