Let's stop this one here

Posted Apr 29, 2024 15:30 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Let's stop this one here by rsidd
Parent article: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

I flagged the subthread, not a specific comment; my request landed in that thread at the point that I found it, not necessarily where things started to take a bad turn.

Let's stop this one here

Posted Apr 29, 2024 16:05 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

It would be helpful, when trying to steer LWN comments away from what you want to see less of, to *very overtly* state the point at which you see the thread going wrong, because people take that as feedback on what you're actually complaining about. Otherwise, if people often see the pattern of "awful comment", "reasonable callout of awful comment", "response to callout saying to stop", without a clear indication that the *entire thread* started from the awful comment was undesirable, what it *looks* like is that you're flagging the callout of bad behavior rather than the bad behavior.

This is *especially* true on topics that reliably attract awful comments.

Let's stop this one here

Posted Apr 29, 2024 17:10 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> Otherwise, if people often see the pattern of "awful comment", "reasonable callout of awful comment", "response to callout saying to stop"

Throwing around insults like "LLM fanatic" and "fascist" is hardly a "reasonable callout of [a] comment", if that's what you were implying.

Let's stop this one here

Posted Apr 29, 2024 17:15 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

The former certainly seems like a non sequitur. The latter seems like an entirely reasonable callout of someone who uses phrases like "woke mob", and I am directly stating that rather than implying it.

In any case, I would propose that going meta and talking *about* the comment thread only provides a certain amount of value, and that value has now been used up. So, let's stop, shall we?