We tend to close topics like that. I’ve seen @sam used the timed close function (where a topic will be closed for {x} hours or days, then automatically reopen) when there’s a long, thoughtful writeup of the pros and cons but a lot of knee-jerk “this is still bad” replies.
I find that this tends to be topic-specific, so temporarily closing those particular problem topics tends to solve the problem. If it doesn’t solve the problem, because the person is doing this in many or all topics they participate in … that violates multiple guidelines I defined in What If We Could Weaponize Empathy? such as
- Endless Contrarianism
- Axe-Grinding
- Griefing
- Persistent Negativity
- Ranting
- Grudges
If one or many of these criteria is met, for a sustained period of time, that’s ample grounds for suspension.
Feel free to cite those rules in public when suspending users. We have suspension reasons that can be applied to accounts (and are in fact required for a suspension). Suspensions are always timed in Discourse, so you can also leave the door open to a person reforming later… but the emotional labor of reforming is on them, not you.
The goal of Discourse is to amortize effort across the community whenever possible … not to concentrate the moderation (and emotional labor) load on staff.
In general when you talk about Intentional Communication, to me that means specialized software. For example, Stack Overflow has very strict (and necessarily so) norms, as it is learning focused Q&A, where the goal is to create a useful shared artifact for future programmers, not “answer my computer programming tech support question right now.”
I can tell you that for many people they do feel that the style of communication on Stack Overflow is a burden. But what they can’t deny is that the results of that structured communication results in very effective search artifacts for future visitors… which of course, is the whole point of those interactions!
(Heh, I just noticed @notriddle posted basically the same thing while I was composing this reply. Do note that the “complaints” in that article are largely misunderstandings of what Stack Overflow is designed to do, and who it’s designed for. Imagine the sheer utter inhumanity of a world where Wikipedia articles don’t start with Hello and end with Thank You Very Much!)
Since Discourse isn’t a specialized communication tool, but a tool for general purpose communication in a variety of disparate communities, there’s a limit to what can be done here.
