So maybe that’s insightful. Point out that conversations (unless they’re debates and everyone’s agreed to debate) are not games.
Consider a verbal fight within a couple. Everyone wants to have the last word and both throw loudly anything they can come up with at each other. In such a situaiton you may be able to break that mental stance of your opponent by "simply" shifting the topic/perspective to something, they did not expect at all. This way, you may be able to force you opponent to give up the trench they dig themself into.
I know its not simple. This is more education than superficial conversation.
I’m saying the space of people communicating is larger than the space of people using words in rhetorical games.
You cannot flip the table and still call it a game. Its not a game move when your intention is progress and not a rhetorical win.
I've seen this state called different things, like "Exiles" in IFS therapy, "below the line", "tilted", "triggering painful spots", I usually call it "defensive".
(Aside... a thing I've learned is not to ask if someone is feeling defensive (if they are, they'll say no). Instead I think the better move is to ask if they feel like I'm not listening, or not understanding their position. This lines up with the internal thoughts of feeling defensive.)
All this to say, rational conversation is possible when two people are in a rational state but there are other states of being.
(Aside.. I find that rational communication techniques like NVC are actually devilishly hard to put into practice all the time because they go out the window when we get tilted.)
(Aside... EFT couples therapy is designed around communication in an emotionally vulnerable state as opposed to rational, and supposedly has pretty good empirical results)
In that sense, does it change the game, just through removing those consequences and thus making bad faith a more attractive strategy than it would be otherwise (e.g. face to face reputation based communication)?
Maybe you are right and positing it as a game is itself reductive, and gets people into a zero-sum mindset, rather than viewing conversation as a win-win.
I treat my local subreddit like I would treat my local pub, especially since I know a few of its users IRL, and many tie my username to my business. I can't say the same about large subreddits.
Tight moderation also helps a ton. It enforces a certain tone, and after a while the community crystallises around that tone and enforces it itself. You don't pick fights at the country club.
I realise now that I stopped interacting in larger communities. I prefer quieter channels where people have a reputation to uphold.
The new moderation team is more heavy-handed. Of course people still aren't happy.
It's a tough job and the pay sucks.
Edit-I’d venture even the ability for the internet to bring together people who would otherwise not have a cohort “breaks at scale” because people just don’t scale like that.
This has been profitable enough that these social media now dominate a large part of public discussions, and other platforms have followed suit either by choice or by selection pressure. Hence a large part of public communication is happening in a context that is (inadvertently or intentionally) built to encourage conflict and outrage. This rewards bad-faith communication, so that is what we get.