
Sealioning - kangman
https://www.quora.com/What-is-sealioning?share=1
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jochung
Asking for proof or data: denying someone's lived experience. Having a debate:
sealioning. Providing evidence: mansplaining.

Yes I know, each of these terms has a well defined meaning. But that's not how
they're used in practice. They are used in games of strategic equivocation.

A better read is this post, which frames it as a conflict between people who
communicate to share information versus people who are seeking emotional
harmony and who interpret disagreement as one-upmanship. One person offers the
gift of information, the other interprets it as a slight.

[https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-
me/](https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/)

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zawerf
You should submit that link as a separate submission. It was a pretty good
read.

~~~
jochung
It was already submitted 5 times and never went anywhere. Nothing from S451
has gotten any traction, except for one post about Hintjens' passing, which
was then visiby flagged. Because of S451's role in rescuing LambdaConf from
the twitter mob with a fundraiser, they are now on the socjus shitlist, and
those links and posts have a habit of disappearing off HN with plausible
deniability.

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swivelmaster
I’ve been accused of this in a contentious discussion on Facebook. I had to
look it up.

The problem here is that the label is based on the assumed intent of the asker
as perceived by the person they’re asking. In my situation, I was asking about
a social justice topic that I probably know more about than the average person
but not nearly as much as the people I was discussing it with. Unfortunately,
said people were in a minority group currently under attack in this country
and were tired of people arguing with them in bad faith. In their eyes, my
questions were indistinguishable from those they had seen before when being
harassed.

It’s a tough situation. I want to understand the issue and I’m happy to listen
to someone explain it to me, but those people are consistently so tired of
explaining themselves and trying to avoid harassment that it all seems like
the same thing.

I don’t really know what the solution is. I don’t really like “Don’t
participate in the discussion until you’ve read a thousand pages of history
and theory about this subject,” but... I don’t know. I’m increasingly
questioning my qualification to even discuss these issues because I simply
don’t have the life experience to understand them.

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Brendinooo
Interesting; I know this term has been around for a few years but I've seen an
uptick in its use in the past week or two.

I think I've seen more examples of it in action as well. Maybe. Seems hard to
know for sure. For example, is "Please provide evidence for your claim" a
good-faith way to start a debate, or is it just a cheap way to keep a person
quiet until he or she can come up with some data?

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RobertRoberts
This seems to be an incredible backdoor propaganda label to stifle logical
discussion. It's an appeal to emotions over facts (my personal group's facts
are better than your objective facts) and to equate obnoxious lunatics with
mature critical thinkers.

Don't like the proofs provided? (cause they show you are wrong) Then you must
be sealioning, even if it's the first thing you write.

Edit: A mature adult does not need a label to deal with annoying and obnoxious
people on the internet. There are lots of ways to deal with them. (the least
of which is to simply ignore them...)

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ryandvm
Agreed. This feels a lot like the "snowflake" label. A way to terminate a
discussion early because you'd rather insult the person than make any actual
progress.

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csixty4
I'm not active on Quora, but it's a place for discussions about a topic. I'm
surprised to hear they see a sealioning problem.

Twitter is where I'm more used to seeing sealioning, where someone will make a
comment about something and a bunch of strangers (sometimes coordinated
elsewhere) show up demanding a debate about it.

