Why do I dislike Chat so much?

Question

1. Because chat is the place where members can sneer behind your back.
2. Chat is the place where members can take delight in telling others that someone (me) is looking to pick a fight.
3. Because chat is the place where members use code such as peroxide blonde instead of using your proper username.
4. But chat is the place to go if you want to highlight someone's anti-social and passive aggressive behaviour.
5. And chat is the one place where the mods take your message of anger and distress seriously.

There is no question.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I understand why you were upset and I don't want you to feel discouraged from coming to chat. I think it was a series of misunderstandings that happened after you and others had some back-and-forth commentary that wasn't immediately visible to me.

1. Chat is one means of bringing potential problems up to a moderator. Flagging for mod attention and comments with an at-ping are another means. A user who points out that they feel there is uncivil behavior occurring is not sneering.

2. There was no indication of emotional value in the statement that "Someone really wants to pick a fight with me" nor were you at all identified by name in that message or thereafter. You interpreted it as referring to yourself and you interpreted as delighted. You might as well have read it as a simple statement of fact or trepidation or confusion.

3. Lolwhut? No one said peroxide blonde. It was peroxide and it was referring to a completely different other conversation that was not in some secret code, but was joking commentary about the White-Haired Girl, a Chinese opera we talked about earlier. You would see it easily if you followed the arrows or scrolled up. I have no idea who you think it would refer to.

4. Passive aggressive is frequently misused and it bothers me. There is no passive aggressive behavior in chat. If you are having problems with anti-social users, you should feel free to flag their inappropriate comments. Also, I did not see any such behavior when you were in chat although I left to commute right after my last comment, so.

5. You should always feel welcome to come to chat to talk to a mod if your concerns aren't addressed quickly. We can speak privately and confidentially if you want. This applies not only to you, but to other users as well, and I hope you understand how this circles us back around to #1.

Finally, I would like to reiterate what I said in chat, and to generalize it:

if you (in the general sense here, not you, Mari-Lou A) find that you are having a heated exchange in comments about something like question closure, migration, or deletion, this is a signal to you (in the general sense here, not you, Mari-Lou A) to post a question on Meta to discuss the issue.

This provides more visibility to the community and will allow you to both garner support for your argument as well as more completely understand the other side of the coin. It will reduce the sense of being personally attacked and open up the discussion for many more than two points of view.

Answer 2

In the name of solidarity, I present the reasons Dan Dislikes Chat:

1. Chat is, effectively, unusable from a phone, my preferred and most frequent interface to SE.
2. I talk too fast and Chat doesn't talk fast enough. Whenever I log in I see something like "14 users currently chatting, last message sent 2 hours ago".
3. Due to (2), I often feel anxious that I'm ignorant of and swimming against the established culture by flooding the channel with a bunch of ADHD comments pursuing whatever tangent my hamster brain has latched onto.

Given the above, I participate rarely in Chat, so I can't say one way or another if the politics are more or less rancorous or the commentary more or less snide than on the main site. I'm not even involved enough there to judge if the remark you quote is the barb you think it is, or the unrelated comment others seem to take it for (which is why I'm unable to vote on your question one way or the other).

But it doesn't matter because the cure is the same either way. To quote the second most imperturbable member of the site¹:

Richard Feynman's last autobiographical work was entitled What Do You Care What Other People Think? I can't aspire to reach his intellectual level, but I try to emulate his attitude. Who here do you empower to distress you?

So long as you know what you're worth, whether you were smeared or not is irrelevant².

¹ _{Sorry, I have to award the diadem to Sven; you couldn't flap him with a giant pancake inverter.}

² _{Protip: If you've never experienced the warm glow of magnanimity that spreads through you when you give someone the benefit of the doubt, then I can personally recommend it. Wonderful tonic for the ego.}