on derailment

[piranha]

i wasn't going to get sucked into racefail II, the thirteenth child, but it happened anyway, so i might as well write about it.

i don't like to call what always happens in such discussion summarily "derailment", because hey, i cut my teeth on usenet, where thread drift was both an inherent bug and a feature, and i know from my own intentions at the time that i didn't mean to derail anything, i was just focussed on a subset of the issue, and especially when facts were in dispute, OMG SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET, and i must set them straight. *rolls eyes at self*.

but it is of course derailment, intent or not. it distracts people from the main point of the thread, and quite often takes over completely. i know this too, because many a thread i would have liked to continue died under a load of fluff, or some side issue that was unimportant to the main points. and i think this is much more destructive in "flat" discussion (sites that don't offer threaded discussion irk me something fierce).

this has been something important for me to learn, and it so happens to be closely associated with GAS (geek answer syndrome): if i am ever so eager to make a small side point in a discussion about something vastly more important -- such as race -- i might want to restrain myself and not post it right then and there. if i think it's semi-important to the main argument (because bad facts undercut it), i must at the very least also contribute something to the main point.

i'm also thinking about how to narrow down the possibility for derailment from the start (my previous post got totally derailed immediately, and i know why). i think i might try and only talk about one subject at a time instead of letting loose half brain salad that's being tossed together as i speak.

Comments

[beckyzoole]

Where is Racefail: The Next Generation taking place? I've seen several people discuss it now, but no links.

(I promise not to jump in and make everything worse. I just enjoy watching trainwrecks, sometimes.)

[ceri]

Ground zero is at Tor.com. Naraht is doing amazing things collecting everyone else's discussion.

[firecat]

Derailment and thread drift cause a lot more damage when the topic is something emotionally difficult.

Re: on derailment

[piranha]

*nod*. yes, exactly.

[deane]

I think that part of the problem is that we are poorly served by our tools. Any decent USENET reader will allow you to navigate subthreads easily and prune any which are not of interest to you. That makes it less of a concern if 60% of the posts are on a digression because you can easily ignore those and focus on the relevant bits.

While it should be possible to produce something even better than that in a graphical browser window, every web discussion forum that I've seen is far less capable than the old text-based USENET readers. Although DW/LJ do provide threaded discussions, it's pretty much all-or-nothing, so a 60% digression really does derail any other topics of discussion.

[aquaeri]

I agree with this. Usenet is the best technology so far for this kind of discussion and we should be able to improve on it, dammit.

usenet-like reading

[piranha]

well, we have sucked russ into dreamwidth, so there's a real possibility that something might actually happen in this regard. *waggles eyebrows*.

he's made an interim suggestion for community tracking: http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/293.html?thread=150309#t150309 which rahaeli likes. i think it would be a good start.

Re: usenet-like reading

[flarenut]

I think part of the problem is that a) web forums were originally based on straight html, which just sucks, and b) many of them were coded by people who had way too much respect for what they considered free speech, as opposed to for free reading. So you just barely have threading, and you don't have anything resembling killfiles (I wonder if greasemonkey could do this) and and and.

Ime there's also a huge amount of thread drift and derailment simply because in most places threads are so heavyweight (tied to a particular pos, and expensive to get from one to another. Some places let you organize by time (recent comments), but that's not really so useful either.

okay, sorry for the MAS blurt. It's late...

[tablesaw]

"Thread drift" is a libertarian concept of discourse. If a topic is discussed it is more important, and if a topic is not discussed or abandoned than it is not important. Supposedly this "free market" maintains a healthy economy of a discussion. Topics are abandoned when they are exhausted and picked up again when there are new things to say about them.

Like most libertarian models, it ignores the differences of agency among the participants.

[flarenut]

Huh. I always thought of it as more of a brownian thing, that even with the best of intentions many people are unable to remain completely focused on one topic. Or perhaps a genetic-recombination thing. So nothing about markets or "worth" in there, just entropy.

Which has a different sort of denial of agency, but one that in many cases seems accurate to me. Derailment, otoh...