Probably going to experiment with actually blocking people
Having been raised on the pre-smartphone Internet, my instinct has always been to never block anyone, operating on a "broken clock is right twice a day" principle when dealing with the humans. However, a while back, I checked the option to range-block all >55 members, and I often post in a way designed to bait excessively ideological people into blocking me, which is borderline passive-aggressive blocking as it is. I cannot deny that both of these strategies have improved the quality of the website far more than I expected them to.
As far as I can tell, the majority of this website's excessive amounts of shittiness seems to emanate from Americans who have totally opted into one of the political party/philosophy/personality cults available in our country. I range-blocked boomers because nearly all Americans that age who are active online match this description, and most of my bait-posting has been targeted at such people.
Running with what's so far proved a successful formula, I'm going to try blocking anyone who consistently signals themselves as having gone all-in on either the Democratic or Republican party cults (or the Trump personality cult if their loyalty thereto is explicitly separate from Republican party loyalty) and see if the quality ticks up yet again (for the purposes of the experiment, a demonstrable habit of emphatically criticizing only [i]one[/i] of these cults will [i]not[/i] be taken as evidence in its own right of belonging to the other).
Not that any of you do or should give a shit about any of this, if we're being honest, but I've talked of never blocking people in the past, so should probably announce any change in that behavior to avoid appearing to have lied.
As far as I can tell, the majority of this website's excessive amounts of shittiness seems to emanate from Americans who have totally opted into one of the political party/philosophy/personality cults available in our country. I range-blocked boomers because nearly all Americans that age who are active online match this description, and most of my bait-posting has been targeted at such people.
Running with what's so far proved a successful formula, I'm going to try blocking anyone who consistently signals themselves as having gone all-in on either the Democratic or Republican party cults (or the Trump personality cult if their loyalty thereto is explicitly separate from Republican party loyalty) and see if the quality ticks up yet again (for the purposes of the experiment, a demonstrable habit of emphatically criticizing only [i]one[/i] of these cults will [i]not[/i] be taken as evidence in its own right of belonging to the other).
Not that any of you do or should give a shit about any of this, if we're being honest, but I've talked of never blocking people in the past, so should probably announce any change in that behavior to avoid appearing to have lied.
