Anybody who posts anything about how a subject SHOULD be perceived BY YOU...

[sibelian]

15. I suppose I'm more thinking about a more aggressive focus

on the shifting of the subject of the disagreement. When the audience becomes the subject of the discourse, as a matter of course for certain posters, over several rounds...

At least, that's what prompted this post. I said "They're incredibly easy to sopt" on a thread that featured a discussion of sockpuppets (by Atman) and realised I was partially basing this troll-spotting instinct on the tendency of actual trolls to make thrashing, desperate attempts to undermine the judgement of their respondent (which always fail), not by clarifying their position, but by doggedly and ineffectively delegitimising the opponent's position. In this process, the subject drifts. "Hair on Fire".

Naturally, we expect a certain amount of "free space" in the discussion of the subject or their wouldn't be a subject under discussion. A debate where two people just constantly reiterate their own positions in different words isn't a debate. What piqued my interest was the extent to which the shifting of the subject from the subject to the respondent could be taken as evidence that the discussion was losing quality. Or being trolled.

I don't know if that tendency is enough to "call bullshit" by itself. So I started this thread to see what other people thought.



I suppose I should really have said all that at the beginning, but I had faith that the initial post was laden enough with specificity that it was clear I suspected something peculiar might be going on. It's natural to find things wrong with other people's arguments, but not if that's the only thing you do, I guess is what I'm thinking.

Anyway, this was all kicked off in my head by the whole "oh, it's an all-about-nothing, hair-on-fire, emo-progs galore subject" type posts from certain very dedicated and otherwise seemingly uninterested people brought out by the NSA debates.