I do stand by what I said about derailing a conversation though, I would say that to anyone, under the same circumstances.

I don’t think gatekeeping others with “you can only talk about the thread topic” is a healthy way to do that, so we diverge there.

I’m not going to stop doing it and, if you look around, you’ll see plenty of others doing it too, so I’m in good company there.

It’s nicer if we let conversation flow naturally and don’t set arbitrary constraints - the mods can do that via the community rules if they want to but, again, you won’t find many examples of that either.

My understanding is that derailing any conversation, hijacking it, has been frowned up socially, both in 1) social media (since the days of dialing into BBS sites with our modems), as well as 2) in real life. Something that is considered harmful/distractful to the ACTUAL conversation being had.

Fun fact. “Conversation Hijacking” is even used in nefarious ways as part of social engineering to get into your computer (actually true, look it up). That it is a type of phishing scam.

Are you saying that is no longer the case, that it is ok to derail/hijack a conversation?

The links I supplied above seem to say otherwise, and that’s my understanding of the current consensus of the Internet/Humanity.

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