# Dealing with highly contentious discussions **URL:** \ **Category:** Community Building\ **Tags:** moderation\ **Created:** [May 17, 2017, 4:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dealing-with-highly-contentious-discussions/62887 "2017-05-17T16:18:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 5
**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 12:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dealing-with-highly-contentious-discussions/62887/5 "2017-05-18T00:21:04Z")
> [@codinghorror](#): > > The goal of this group is to take the conversations offline and to be neighborly. Therefore, articles should just be mostly suggested reading material. If comments get out of hand I will remove the post. This one is interesting because it’s the most “offline” of the advice. No referring web links as citations? But that’s what you do in web discussions! Reframing this as **tell us your personal story** or **tell the story in your own words** is an interesting direction, and actively steers people away from “generic talking points” they would get from a commonly cited article or source. That could be helpful advice… if perhaps hard to avoid (and do you _want_ to avoid citations?) for online discussions. > [@codinghorror](#): > > We should avoid labels as much as possible such as Democrats think this and Republicans do that Excellent advice both online and offline. Labels _don’t_ help. In fact, I think the presence of common pejorative labels like “SJW” can be fodder for auto-flagging as the discussion has already started to degrade. It’s one of the reasons I want to get to that more flexible blacklisting system, where the presence of certain words can trigger a variety of actions, maybe even a webhook, for Discourse 1.9 @neil. Focus on actions, what people _do_, rather than what they look like, remains excellent advice across the board. > [@codinghorror](#): > > Participants goals should NOT be to try to influence or change their neighbor’s mind. I have been thinking this for a while. Nobody’s ever going to change their mind immediately on anything. Tell me, when was the last time you actually changed your mind on something you felt strongly about? What was that process like, how did it work? Really think through how it happened, and why. For me, changing my mind is a process of hearing a lot of perspectives and data over time, and a slow shift to a tipping point. It’s never, ever been a case of “I read X and immediately realized how wrong I was!” So perhaps this advice is quite apt: **forget changing people’s minds, just tell your story**. A great, heartfelt, honest story can work towards changing someone’s mind in much more powerful ways than .. a literal attempt to get them to change their mind. > [@codinghorror](#): > > At the meeting, a person is not allowed to dominate the conversation We have an education panel for this in Discourse, if you haven’t seen it yet: ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/9/6/9650b89597e17f3caa62376c850cf3d303be3786.png) This definitely covers the common “replying too much and dominating the conversation” pattern. Unfortunately, there is a slightly less common way to dominate the conversation that we don’t yet account for: **disproportionately long replies**. What I mean is that for every reply, the other person writes thousands of words in response, consistently, time over time. There’s something … wrong with this pattern, and you can see it in [this discussion I had on my blog](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/can-software-make-you-less-racist/4575). ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/a/0/a07bb560bc9733c1ca9eb729fe3ae2d3cb9fa448.png) It is a kind of filibustering, where every reply is met with a torrent of words, nothing terrible about any of those words individually, but considered as a whole they are not-so-accidentally smothering you with .. verbosity. Crowding you out, not with logic or reason or even a good story, but with sheer _volume_. Eventually they wear you out (and down), because they’re willing to invest so much effort in these disproportionate replies. But, unless they’re copying and pasting, it’s certainly work that requires an ample amount of free time. > [@codinghorror](#): > > The focus will be on issues and policy — not on character traits of a politician I view this as mostly the same as point #2; labels are shortcuts to assigning generic “character traits” to people, when they are wildly diverse. As before, **focus on actions, what people _actually do_**. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dealing-with-highly-contentious-discussions/62887)._