You can side step. A common tactic for mediators.

Consider a verbal fight within a couple. Everyone wants to have the last word and both throw loudly anything they can come up with at each other. In such a situaiton you may be able to break that mental stance of your opponent by "simply" shifting the topic/perspective to something, they did not expect at all. This way, you may be able to force you opponent to give up the trench they dig themself into.

I know its not simple. This is more education than superficial conversation.

I find the best tactic in this situation is to let the other party exhaust themselves. You're never going to be heard, so just listen (actually listen, not pretend) until they've got whatever they want to say out, and then make a response that shows you've listened and tried to understand.

At which point you’ve used a rhetorical tactic and turned a conversation into a game.

I’m saying the space of people communicating is larger than the space of people using words in rhetorical games.

When a conversation is stagnating in a cycle and you elevate it on a meta level, away from the original topic to that conversation and how it is going, you will not only display good faith but you may be able to find the traces of good faith in your opponent and maybe turn back to the original topic.

You cannot flip the table and still call it a game. Its not a game move when your intention is progress and not a rhetorical win.

I personally use the meta-conversational move a lot, and it usually turns heated political discussions into more thoughtful philosophy discussions. I think because most people don't have such strong identity based beliefs around questions like "how can we know if something is right/true/good/bad, what does that mean?"

The meta-conversation technique blew up for me once. A buddy and I got into it and I went in that direction of how do we know if something is good or bad, right or wrong, and it had him feeling incredibly frustrated and distraught, questioning whether his friends have fundamentally different values than he does. I recognized in that moment he seemed very emotionally vulnerable and so I switched out of my head exploration and opened up deep abkut some of the emotional struggles I had been facing. I think very often conflicts are not about the actual conflict we discuss, but about tangential, or even unrelated, things.

That actually sounds like a true philosophical situation, where you both questioned some deeply held beliefs. This can have epistemologically and existential repercussions for the individual, especially if you are emotionally invested (and we always are at some level)

Perhaps, I'll think about that a bit more. I think I was seeing it more as me using theorizing as a defense mechanism to avoid opening up emotionally and connecting with my friend on a deeper level. I've noticed in my life that I can often dive deeper into theory, hypothetical situations, and general philosophy as way to distance myself from how I'm actually feeling in the moment and from saying that to others.

Oh yea, as a general rule of thumb I have found that if any party is getting emotional (defensive, frustrated, hurt, etc) then the conversation will have to pivot to feelings.. something about the pre-frontal cortex going offline when we get into a certain state.

I've seen this state called different things, like "Exiles" in IFS therapy, "below the line", "tilted", "triggering painful spots", I usually call it "defensive".

(Aside... a thing I've learned is not to ask if someone is feeling defensive (if they are, they'll say no). Instead I think the better move is to ask if they feel like I'm not listening, or not understanding their position. This lines up with the internal thoughts of feeling defensive.)

All this to say, rational conversation is possible when two people are in a rational state but there are other states of being.

(Aside.. I find that rational communication techniques like NVC are actually devilishly hard to put into practice all the time because they go out the window when we get tilted.)

(Aside... EFT couples therapy is designed around communication in an emotionally vulnerable state as opposed to rational, and supposedly has pretty good empirical results)

Does digitization remove the negative consequences of communicating in bad faith?

In that sense, does it change the game, just through removing those consequences and thus making bad faith a more attractive strategy than it would be otherwise (e.g. face to face reputation based communication)?

Maybe you are right and positing it as a game is itself reductive, and gets people into a zero-sum mindset, rather than viewing conversation as a win-win.

I find that it depends on the size of the community, and your stake in that community. If you're a regular somewhere, you're a lot less likely to start some shit there. After a while some users earn a reputation that affects all future interactions.

I treat my local subreddit like I would treat my local pub, especially since I know a few of its users IRL, and many tie my username to my business. I can't say the same about large subreddits.

Tight moderation also helps a ton. It enforces a certain tone, and after a while the community crystallises around that tone and enforces it itself. You don't pick fights at the country club.

I realise now that I stopped interacting in larger communities. I prefer quieter channels where people have a reputation to uphold.

Agreed moderation is essential. It's easy to spot and remove people who don't care about harmony or true discussion, but it often doesn't happen (or moderators are themselves bad actors).

My policy as a moderator was to moderate tone but not opinions. Some people weren't happy when "the good guys" got their posts deleted and "the bad guys" didn't, because the latter left their guns at the door.

The new moderation team is more heavy-handed. Of course people still aren't happy.

It's a tough job and the pay sucks.

"Social media made y'all way to comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." - Mike Tyson

Digitization has clearly added lots of negatives that otherwise wouldn’t last. As simple as, does it really make sense for something local with only local and fittingly small consequences, to be discussed at a global level? But anybody can post a photo or video to be seen the world over. Depending on content there will even be users on the internet policing (“influencing”) other users in the internet to weigh in on whatever. But clearly human societies function at a level of cohesion that breaks apart at scale. Ie there isn’t one truly universal way to live that everyone can and in time could be made to live.

Edit-I’d venture even the ability for the internet to bring together people who would otherwise not have a cohort “breaks at scale” because people just don’t scale like that.

I think digitization, specifically the commoditization of attention in advertising-supported social media, has strongly incentivized bad-faith communication. It turns out that outrage and conflict are a great way to get attention. So systems made to profit from keeping attention have inadvertently started promoting conflict and outrage to capture the value of the attention produced.

This has been profitable enough that these social media now dominate a large part of public discussions, and other platforms have followed suit either by choice or by selection pressure. Hence a large part of public communication is happening in a context that is (inadvertently or intentionally) built to encourage conflict and outrage. This rewards bad-faith communication, so that is what we get.