Can anyone recommend an online discussion group which displays neurotypical communication at its best? It seems to me that the politeness examples in this discussion are a little hypothetical.
This is not the answer to your question, but it might be relevant/interesting that communicating respectfully/politely by default is one of the stated rules of #xkcd. Obviously it doesn’t actually happen every moment, and people aren’t kicked for being rude once, but there is an atmosphere of not tolerating rudeness for its own sake. The ops are reluctant, but willing if it goes on long enough, to get rid of someone whose only crime is being incredibly unpleasant to interact with. This is in line with the community’s goal of being pleasant and entertaining; if the goal were getting some sort of work done, it might be important to tolerate people who are rude but useful, but that’s not the case.
The specific relevant text in the channel rules (in a section on “generalities,” not specific things to do/not do) is this:
Be nice. There are plenty of places on the internet where you can be cruel, but not many where you can be nice, and #xkcd is one of them. If you’re not usually nice, give it a try. You might be amazed.
There’s also a simplified version of the rules page that exists to give people a general sense of how to behave without swamping them in specific examples. It includes:
Act like an adult, whether or not you are one.
Speak to each other with respect, whether or not you actually have any.
...
Don’t be offensive without being funny. The more offensive you are, the funnier you also have to be.
You are not the arbiter of whether you’re too offensive or funny enough.
Just because your gay black female friend doesn’t mind you saying it doesn’t mean you can say it anywhere.
...
If someone asks you politely to stop doing something, stop doing it.
It’s clearly possible to abuse that last one by asking someone politely to stop doing something which is totally reasonable, but in actual practice that hasn’t been a problem.
It’s an interesting example of balancing the need for clear rules without having so much specificity that it’s easy to game.
Yeah, that was one of the major goals in the channel rules. Both the long and the short versions are explicit that if you come up with a way to be a pain in the ass that we haven’t already thought of, we’ll still kick you, even though it’s not already in the rules. :P If you’re curious, the long version is here and the short version is here. I didn’t compose all of them but I did write them. (That is, I didn’t choose everything that went in them, but I picked most of the words and put them on a page.)
but nothing about how long it went on or how it worked out in the long run.
It’s still going on, in #xkcd-signal on Foonetic. I don’t follow the channel actively right now, but my experience when I was there and the channel’s continuing reputation are that it has high-quality conversations at very long intervals. That is, it tends to be quiet for long periods, but the conversations that do happen are relatively free of noise.
What do you consider to be ‘best’? I’ve been part of a couple of communities that drove me away because it cost me too much effort to match their levels of praise and politeness. I’d be happy to try to dig up links if I can remember what they’re called..
I don’t think that neurotypicality is incapacitating in general, only for me and other people who didn’t acquire neurotypical social skills for whatever reason. It cost me a lot of effort to participate in those communities because I was effectively trying to speak a foreign language, and I’d only just started to learn how at the time.
One of them appears to have died.
Here’s(I would recommend just skimming the first 5 pages or so to get a feel for it) a forum thread I was reading recently. I haven’t participated but the tone in there strikes me as simultaneously extremely polite and quite focussed on the subject at hand.
Perhaps Metafilter? There are sometimes a few flame wars, but the discussions are usually informed and sincere, with a variety of nice people, and the moderator team is good at keeping things on-topic and on-track.
The majority of it isn’t one-on-one conversation, though, since the comments aren’t threaded. So it might be a little hard to find really awesome examples pertinent to our discussion here.
you might be defining neurotypicality by its worst features.
More precisely, I may be defining “most stereotypical neurotypical default behaviours” by the worst features, where each of ‘most’, ‘stereotypical’ and ‘default’ is a significant qualifier. ‘Default’ is particularly interesting—our civilisation devotes a large amount of resources to setting up institutions to prevent ‘default’ behaviour.
Can anyone recommend an online discussion group which displays neurotypical communication at its best? It seems to me that the politeness examples in this discussion are a little hypothetical.
This is not the answer to your question, but it might be relevant/interesting that communicating respectfully/politely by default is one of the stated rules of #xkcd. Obviously it doesn’t actually happen every moment, and people aren’t kicked for being rude once, but there is an atmosphere of not tolerating rudeness for its own sake. The ops are reluctant, but willing if it goes on long enough, to get rid of someone whose only crime is being incredibly unpleasant to interact with. This is in line with the community’s goal of being pleasant and entertaining; if the goal were getting some sort of work done, it might be important to tolerate people who are rude but useful, but that’s not the case.
The specific relevant text in the channel rules (in a section on “generalities,” not specific things to do/not do) is this:
There’s also a simplified version of the rules page that exists to give people a general sense of how to behave without swamping them in specific examples. It includes:
It’s clearly possible to abuse that last one by asking someone politely to stop doing something which is totally reasonable, but in actual practice that hasn’t been a problem.
Thanks. It’s an interesting example of balancing the need for clear rules without having so much specificity that it’s easy to game.
I found this experiment with requiring non-redundant communication, but nothing about how long it went on or how it worked out in the long run.
Yeah, that was one of the major goals in the channel rules. Both the long and the short versions are explicit that if you come up with a way to be a pain in the ass that we haven’t already thought of, we’ll still kick you, even though it’s not already in the rules. :P If you’re curious, the long version is here and the short version is here. I didn’t compose all of them but I did write them. (That is, I didn’t choose everything that went in them, but I picked most of the words and put them on a page.)
It’s still going on, in #xkcd-signal on Foonetic. I don’t follow the channel actively right now, but my experience when I was there and the channel’s continuing reputation are that it has high-quality conversations at very long intervals. That is, it tends to be quiet for long periods, but the conversations that do happen are relatively free of noise.
What do you consider to be ‘best’? I’ve been part of a couple of communities that drove me away because it cost me too much effort to match their levels of praise and politeness. I’d be happy to try to dig up links if I can remember what they’re called..
Good question, and I’m not sure. However, neurotypicality can’t be totally incapacitating, or they wouldn’t be in the majority.
If you remember the names of those communities, please post them.
I don’t think that neurotypicality is incapacitating in general, only for me and other people who didn’t acquire neurotypical social skills for whatever reason. It cost me a lot of effort to participate in those communities because I was effectively trying to speak a foreign language, and I’d only just started to learn how at the time.
One of them appears to have died. Here’s(I would recommend just skimming the first 5 pages or so to get a feel for it) a forum thread I was reading recently. I haven’t participated but the tone in there strikes me as simultaneously extremely polite and quite focussed on the subject at hand.
Perhaps Metafilter? There are sometimes a few flame wars, but the discussions are usually informed and sincere, with a variety of nice people, and the moderator team is good at keeping things on-topic and on-track.
The majority of it isn’t one-on-one conversation, though, since the comments aren’t threaded. So it might be a little hard to find really awesome examples pertinent to our discussion here.
At its best? That would be when the social payoffs were set up in such a way as to penalise the most ‘stereotypical neurotypical’ default behaviours.
You might be right, or you might be defining neurotypicality by its worst features.
More precisely, I may be defining “most stereotypical neurotypical default behaviours” by the worst features, where each of ‘most’, ‘stereotypical’ and ‘default’ is a significant qualifier. ‘Default’ is particularly interesting—our civilisation devotes a large amount of resources to setting up institutions to prevent ‘default’ behaviour.