On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:04 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/2/13 Al Tally
<majorly.wiki(a)googlemail.com>om>:
Often people don't know they're having a
bad day, and may respond more
harshly than they would normally. Not their fault, it's human nature.
There's also people's tendency to be liberal in what they send out and
conservative in what they accept. I remember one person moving to ban
sarcasm from Wikipedia project space. He was inspired to this when
someone responded sarcastically to him comparing them to Hitler.
I think that "bad day" and "liberal in emit conservative in accept"
go
together fairly strongly. People who are reasonable (most people) only get
that way on bad days.
Part of the problem is that there's a quite legitimate tendency for the
first thing that goes when you get grumpy or sick to be your introspective
self-checking...
People in real life respond a bit better to "Hey, you seem to be extra
grumpy today, why don't you take the day off?" than they do online. There's
the whole depersonalizing / disassociating effect of not seeing people in
front of you when communicating electronically.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com