The moderation is a victim of it’s own success. Moderation here is excellent at removing overtly hostile, obscene or aggressively offensive material.
However, it does not regulate personality/characterological traits which are not necessarily “wrong,” but still antisocial. This includes passive aggression, multiple repetitive overly long replies within one thread, advice w/o any attempt at empathy, the tendency to parse every statement in order to take offense, and beating a dead horse. And the worst on here: extensive post histories in which one is never wrong, and never concedes a point ever.
These are all behaviors that tend to be corrected; if at all, by mockery and overt hostility, so when those are moderated successfully you eventually create a thriving safe zone for these second tier anti-social approaches to posting. \
I think that this kind of “Church Lady” style of being subtly uncharitable, sadly may be more common on a Christian/Catholic forum than a secular one.
Another passive-aggressive posting strategy I have noticed is to heavily imply something very uncharitable such as implying one’s opponent in a topic is Hell-bound.
“I’ll be praying for you” is one utterance that can be very insulting if in the context of “obviously you are a horrible sinner who needs to be prayed for the way St. Monica prayed for St. Augustine”.
Yet when called out upon it, such passive aggressive posters will adamantly deny they ever meant such a thing, and claim THEY are the victims of hostile posters who are uncharitably “twisting my words”.
Then there’s the “say very insulting uncharitable things” followed by a platitude like “have a blessed day” and think they are now immune from any charges of being uncharitable because “but LOOK I wished them a blessed day, so obviously I didn’t mean to be uncharitable”!
I’ll admit, it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when a poster can never admit that someone else has a valid point nor even entertain the thought that they themselves could ever be wrong about anything—even mundane things that have nothing to do with the faith. That’s just a recipe for polarization right there. I mean, even broken clocks are right twice a day. We shouldn’t be afraid to confirm what is correct, even if it comes from a poster we disagree with most of the time.
This is very common in the political and “culture war” topics where people seem to think they cannot afford to ever admit being wrong, because that is to provide your political “enemies” with more ammunition against you. But other than a handful of extreme partisans, very few people in Real Life act this way.
When it comes to Family Life, I can certainly think of posters who “give advice” with an attitude of: “I obviously have a better sense of judgment, and am morally superior to all of you, and thus have the God-given ability to sit on my throne above you and judge you all. Everyone should take my critiques to heart. And if I praise someone, they should be grateful for it”.
Then there is the "this approach of raising my kids, budgeting my money, etc., worked for me, so everyone should also follow the same system. If they don’t they are being irresponsible. No allowances for changes in circumstance, those are just excuses. " attitude.
On the other hand there is the “Anyone extolling the virtues of how they raise their family, MUST be out to attack me because they know I raise my family in a completely different way” attitude, that leads to a lot of “Mommy Wars” though they seem less prevalent these days.
I personally try to not pay attention to the name attached to a post and just reply to the content. There are posters I vehemently disagree with politically, but who I have great discussions with non-political topics.
However posting history is a thing. There are many posters I have on unofficial ignore because I do not find engaging with them to be a productive use of my time at all.
Thank you.
) where I see posters saying things that aren’t really against forum rules per se, but just don’t seem like the best way to advance a conversation.
That would make it easier to stick to the topic at hand. Although, sometimes I have found it helpful to remember, such as the posters who are constantly asking if this or that is a sin. Sometimes the single post doesn’t tell the whole story.
