I don’t think the problem is something that can be patched with Crocker’s Rules—I think the problem is lazy reading. That many dedicated contributors are lazy was shown off by the responses to MBlume’s “The Fundamental Question”: a substantial fraction of top-level responses interpreted the post as community-building instead of philosophy, a misinterpretation which only makes sense if they completely missed the entire first paragraph. Given that regular comments are read with even less care as a rule, anyone who doesn’t make what they say sound obviously true to this community will get slammed, correct or not.
I don’t think the problem is something that can be patched with Crocker’s Rules—I think the problem is lazy reading. That many dedicated contributors are lazy was shown off by the responses to MBlume’s “The Fundamental Question”: a substantial fraction of top-level responses interpreted the post as community-building instead of philosophy, a misinterpretation which only makes sense if they completely missed the entire first paragraph. Given that regular comments are read with even less care as a rule, anyone who doesn’t make what they say sound obviously true to this community will get slammed, correct or not.