When things get heated, especially in political or otherwise controversial topics, one should be very careful not to get carried away. The problem in these cases is very often to be found to certain extent on all sides. Both opponents and yourself let passion turn into emotions that are not fruitful for the debate.
I liked an instruction I found some time ago on how to avoid trolls, but also how to avoid not becoming a troll yourself. And here is the most important thing to always remember from that document:
- A conversation is not a contest!
Here is the related post: Best practice on Avoiding Trolls (and don't become one yourself)
After things got out of hand I think an important quality to practics is to return to humility and humbleness again. And if you offended opponents and others involved to not be afraid to come up with a Mea Culpa. There was an interesting pattern proposed to build such feature in Twitter or any other social network:
I don’t know what the best place is for your father to hang out. It also depends on the politics subject he’s interested in. Reddit can be a cesspool, but it depends on moderation of the various subreddits. I have heard there are some very fine ones for politics. But I don’t actively use the platform, other than read some threads now and then.
Not a place for your father, but as for an examplar of excellent moderation I want to mention Hacker News. the social network for techies hosted by YCombinator (largest startup accelerator of Silicon Valley). Whatever you think of the audience that is on the platform (in terms of humane / non-humane tech), the moderation is next to none. Might be the best around.
HN is with millions of users is moderated literally by this one guy Dan (username @dang). They layout looks deceptively simple, but on the server there are complex rules at work. This together with the simple reputation system (karma, upvote/downvote) and simple guidelines have created an environment where after all this time the culture has remained non-toxic.
If you shitpost, imply something about someone else without facts, reasonable arguments or formulated in unfriendly way, you are immediately downvoted + removed from the thread (there is an option for users to see “dead” and “flagged” comments and URL submissions, which is quite cool to observe).
This is a great article about Dan and Hacker News: