apologise profusely for everything you say, accentuate that you aren’t attacking the person but the stance, repeatedly mention that you’re just being the devil’s advocate, use lots of emojis, sandwich the criticism between praise and compliments.

more seriously, do you have an example of what inspired you to ask this? i’m guessing you saw something that caused you to make this post. it would be interesting to see how you thought it was handled badly

Really depends on who you want to make better at this. I'm interested more that people are in good faith than that they don't hurt me or aren't aggressive towards me, sometimes that is appropriate.

I think it's like any part of politics.

1. People directly interested can ask people who are better how to do it.

2. Some people are open to it and if you create the right environment they will slowly learn the logics and come around.

3. And sometimes if you just do broad-based education you can spend effort on a lot of people and maybe a very small fraction of those people will begin the journey themselves.

Basically at no point are we 'making' people do stuff though, people either come to what you make available or they don't.

For 1 and in general, finding ways to articulate what makes for good faith discussion seems to be the key thing. Probably an internet search would come up with loads of ways of doing this.

I think a lot can be learned from hedgehod libertarians and ancaps in this regard. Now there are lots of different people who identify as pro capitalist libertarians so this only applied to the people who actually are anti authoritarians who prefer anti authoritarianism to social conservatism. For many even nonnazis wolf in sheeps clothing as libertarians they will very quickly love cops if it means it upholds social conservatism. But for many libertarians online and especially in person they are very good at amicable conversation. Now this has been critiqued as they are a bit too good at it (hearing out white supremacist ideas bc its just a conversation ect).

In my experience the haflway decent and libertarians who's philosophy is actually of hedgehod libertarianism are quite good at having amicable conversations. The two diehard ones I know in my family are the few I am ok with having conversations with my views with. Hedhog libertarianism is a philosphy that is very conductive to having an extremely open mind and hearing people out but being reasonably critical.

When I was deeper into the pro capitalist authoritarian stuff I would literally just go out and read everyone's perspective. Like that white identitarian crap was really popular at the time so I would listen to them a ton never really agreeing but listening to them and taking their positions seriously so I could understand. Its a philosophy that would make me very open to listening to others critically but seriously considering their positions.

Thats how I got into the philosophical position I'm in now. I realized the libertarian socialist stuff was a massive blind spot to me. I just kept reading stuff I disagreed with being critical in my mind but taking the positions seriously. I'd say like > 50% of the political stuff I would read would be very anti to what I believe.

A space which promotes letting everyone be, listening to peoples perspective and taking it seriously and generally being peaceful and amicable unless actively being violently attacked or stolen from creates a space of a lot of people who will have open discussion with you amicably.

Now I think something about the human experience is if you encounter viewpoints which are radically different than views central to how you view the world you will initially reject it and not take it too seriously, but being in an environment which promotes a (ugh) free market place of ideas the ideas kinda stick in your head. The person you argued with and didn't take seriousness's positions kinda bounce around in your head everyone in a while and u generally take it more seriously over time if its good.

Now I think often in anarchist spaces anti nazism primes people to feel like any viewpoint that they may possibly write off unjustly as bigoted must be attacked and not taken seriously. So this primes people who encounter viewpoints in significant opposition to theirs to outright reject and attack people who expouse it.

So I think for anarchism as a philosophy overall being abusive and not taking significantly different viewpoints seriously is a feature not a bug. That is both good and bad but is a very difficult barrier for open discussion.

So I think an cap spaces can teach a lot about this. Maybe adapting their views on being amicable and open to other positions but adapting it so you can be open but not enable shit heads to expouse their shit and take over. Its a very fine line and I think the more amicable and open to other positions the more you open up a space for people who have more toxic ideas to scare marginalized people away. So being more open to positions can cause an effect of the positions you view to be less diverse as marginalized people will get scared off from some of the more negative users.

So I think the feature of raddle where significantly opposing viewpoints are not taken seriously and kinda brutally attacked emotionally is a feature that makes raddle such a fascinating place to hang out. Tho fall out of this can be kinda annoying to deal with but its something I'm fine dealing with as it keeps raddle the interesting space that it is.

I think a lot of this might come from a misapplication of anti authoritarian propoganda tactics. Take OPSEC for instance good OPSEC gives you a line for what info you can talk about and what info you can't this allows you to be very open about the info that you choose to keep separate. But most often in anarchist spaces OPSEC is misunderstood and users try to hide as much information as possible even if such info is not bad OPSEC to give out. So this bad OPSEC tactics doesn't hurt OPSEC but does significantly hurt people as they feel like they can't be open about anything in their real life when in reality they have a line for what they can talk about and what they can't.

I think this same can apply to listening to alternative viewpoints. I'm a big supporter of safe spaces and getting rid of shit heads I don't like. I like raddle not being riddled with tankies libs, anti feminist, racists ect. So making them not want to use the site is important for keeping it useful. Though I think there is a line in there somewhere where a position can be taken seriously and amicable conversation can be had and just cyber bulling them so they go away. I think most raddle users myself included can and should be a little more open to opposing viewpoints but finding the line where being amicable and keeping a safe space is a difficult spot to hit so the result is people staying on the safe side and not being open to stuff in the grey area.

Now I don't want to just play defense for this kinda abusive behavior. A lot of times it is played off a tactical and valuable but often people just don't want to do the effort to hear out alternative ideas and use the excuse of maintains a safe space to get rid of alternative thought.

I frequently think politics is mostly the organization and distribution of social violence. There have to be a lot of shared assumptions about what is going on for a safe space to discuss something. It does take some good faith in the sense that you have an open mind and are willing to change your mind as well as the others being open to changing their ideas, behavior, etc..

My experience online with one old friend in particular was extremely time consuming and, in the end, I felt a failure. Despite their assurances that we were just going to have to agree to disagree it seemed obvious that they were just trying to be heard by as many people as possible and had absolutely no interest in considering an open discussion. There's a video in a series called the alt-right playbook-Never Play Defense-that I liked but in the end the suggestion was just to avoid those discussions which I ended up doing with that person. Maybe I could have just tried taking our discussions to a more private pace and stayed on better terms because I didn't actually mind discussing a lot of things with them.