I think you're underestimating the savvy of bad faith participants. Even doing that now lets them take control of the narrative and forces you to do twice the work to respond to their poorly worded message. That's time and effort you're not spending moving the conversation in a more productive direction.
This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common. What is common is people perceiving bad faith where there is none; I'm trying to give them a way to handle that without turning conversations into disasters. :)
> This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common.
One of the unnerving things about the world today is that we really don't know how common bad-faith participation is in online spaces. We do know that state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored trolling and astroturfing happens. We can infer that those organizations wouldn't spend money on that if they didn't more than recoup their investment. That implies that there is enough bad-faith participation to affect real-world outcomes.
But we really don't know how much. It's even hard to draw the line between bad-faith actors and good-faith ones. If a concerted trolling campaign persuades some to genuinely change their belief and then that person goes on to parrot those beliefs, are they acting in good faith or bad?
It's also important to remember that the blast radius of even a single bad-faith actor is quite large. It doesn't take much malice to harm an entire community.
