I apologize if I was too quick to misdiagnose the issue. FWIW, I think I’d have trouble responding dispassionately to “Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not.” To be clear, I think I also would have trouble dispassionately responding to claims that I’m a sock puppet, and I do think it’s reasonable for you to be quite upset about this.
I don’t think many of the people who do it are conscious of what they’re doing, but there does seem to be an assumption that strong criticism (i.e. what is necessary if something is very wrong or someone has acted badly) is by default aggressive and thus in violation of group norms.
Thus, all criticism must be stated in the most faux-friendly, milquetoast way possible, imposing significant effort demands on the critic and allowing them to be disregarded if they ever slip up and actually straightforwardly say that a bad thing is bad.
I agree that if someone is genuinely a terrible person, especially if that someone is a big or semi-big figure in the community, our politeness norms may make it more annoying to criticize them harshly than if we had more combative norms. I agree that this is pretty bad inasomuch as it makes things harder to unearth real problems, and this is a plausible hypothesis.
I think I still want to defend some fraction of such norms however, because I think our online norms are still fairly aggressive compared to what most people are used to offline, and I suspect if our online culture is substantially more aggressive (especially in unkind ways) than it currently is, this will make it harder for people to engage and address real problems, rather than just disengage.
I apologize if I was too quick to misdiagnose the issue. FWIW, I think I’d have trouble responding dispassionately to “Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not.” To be clear, I think I also would have trouble dispassionately responding to claims that I’m a sock puppet, and I do think it’s reasonable for you to be quite upset about this.
I agree that if someone is genuinely a terrible person, especially if that someone is a big or semi-big figure in the community, our politeness norms may make it more annoying to criticize them harshly than if we had more combative norms. I agree that this is pretty bad inasomuch as it makes things harder to unearth real problems, and this is a plausible hypothesis.
I think I still want to defend some fraction of such norms however, because I think our online norms are still fairly aggressive compared to what most people are used to offline, and I suspect if our online culture is substantially more aggressive (especially in unkind ways) than it currently is, this will make it harder for people to engage and address real problems, rather than just disengage.