Quote:
Originally Posted by well named
... I can't substantiate that claim with some kind of study but I've been posting on internet forums for a long time and it seems pretty obvious to me... A forum where most of the posting is no-content sniping will encourage more of the same, and vice-versa...
Right here I'm (continuing) to call BS.
There are two garbage-in-garbage-out assumptions here: (1) That name-calling is the 800-lb elephant of derails, and (2) that there is a hard dichotomy between chats that include name-calling -vs- chats that are typically characterized as "productive".
These are just flat-out false.
As I've pointed out many times, mindless semantical derails regarding the r-word dwarf by orders of magnitude all other derails here in Los Dos Politards. Why are we wasting all this time worrying about a relative derail 'mouse' (name-calling), and completely ignoring the true 800-lb gorilla in the room (mindless squabbling over the r-word).
Two, this whole vendetta against name-calling not only doesn't have any "kind of studies" backing it up... it can't even be rationalized anecdotally. Let's say we took the top 25 threads by posts prior to Nuevo Baja, and did a quick and dirty sort into "productive", or "derailed", and for those deemed "derailed", what was the major in-thread cause. Let's say we did the same for the top 25 (or all, if there aren't that many) threads post Nuevo Baja.
If someone did this, we'd (a) have an anecdotal data point to back up this demonization of name-calling, or (b) we could have a hearty round of lol-sample size. Right now, all we got is bald-faced assertion, followed up by *sound_of_crickets*.