Leaving Orbit

I was going to suggest something along the lines of your feature request. In an ideal world, I'd like it to tie in to a system that reminds the parent poster of open responses they wished to address (not through in-your-face notifications, but kept in some easily accessed list/priority queue).

I don't generally worry at all about the etiquette of actively deciding to disengage online. What I do worry about is that I/others will forget to follow up on productive exchanges.

Generally, the people I'm most eager to get responses from have many high value ways to spend their time. To the extent that not responding is efficient for them, I have no problem with that. It only seems to be a net loss if they forgot/lost track.

Agreed. There are benefits to low-cost exit, but also costs, and which wins out depends on the situation.

Unavoidable does seem likely but there may be a positive aspect as well. Since it will be a term that is cryptic to the uninitiated they are likely not to feel confident assigning any particular interpretation to the exit. And, one hopes in this type of environment, will produce a query about the term without feeling anyone was trying to hide something or exclude someone.

For an uninitiated reader, "tapping out" at least has the advantage of a pre-existing non-LW use that, even if you don't know it, makes the phrase easily searchable.

"Tapping out" derives, I think, from a context where it specifically indicates acknowledging defeat, whereas the LW term specifically wants not to. 

Good luck with that.

Things are what they are, regardless of what you'd like them to be. Any time you have pressure to avoid admitting defeat, trying to get around that by calling it "leaving orbit" is just going to make a euphemism out of "leaving orbit". Try going to a jiu jitsu gym and saying "I'm not tapping out, I'm just leaving orbit" and see how that goes. "Yeah, sure thing buddy".

People tap for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes try to explain their taps. Sometimes it's "Tap. I need to use the bathroom right now", sometimes they'll say "I'm just too tired", sometimes it's "That was a crank, not a choke". These can all be true and these can all be ego defense, and the way jiu jitsu gyms have solved this is with the common knowledge that a tap is a tap. Your defense may be valid, and people may even accept it, but at the end of the day the gym functions because of the recognition that you have no right to an ego defense and if you tapped you tapped. The "Oh, I'm not tapping, I'm just 'leaving orbit'" approach is the polar opposite; it's an attempt to guarantee ego defense which cannot and should not be guaranteed.

The reason the former works better than the latter is that the problem is aggression and poor handling of bruised egos, not bruised egos themselves.

Any time you're trying in part to demonstrate your skill and dominance (even if you're not supposed to and don't want to see yourself as doing this), you are going to find out if your self perception is justified and it's gonna hurt when it's not. If you try to cut this feedback path, you will fail. It will still feel bad to have to "leave orbit", and people will still know that the legible and transmissible facts are that you wanted to stop when you were in an uncomfortable position. To the limited extent that you do manage to disrupt this flow of information, you'll have hindered people's ability to learn when they should assert less and listen more. This is not a good thing to shoot for.

On the other hand, a norm of "A tap is a tap" normalizes the very normal thing of defeat. We all tap, and it's really hard to learn without doing so. In a jiu jitsu gym with a good atmosphere, you can roll when tired and tap due to exhaustion. You can put yourself in weak positions to play with defending weak positions, and no one will think less of you when you do, because tapping is normal and they probably recognize that you're purposely allowing yourself to be more vulnerable than necessary. Yes, you're "admitting defeat" to an extent, in a way, and that's okay. The only time when it hurts to tap is when you've been posturing above your level, and that discomfort is the very important incentive to be appropriately humble.

There's more that goes into a healthy atmosphere were people are willing to risk and comfortable admitting a form of defeat, of course. It has to actually be clear what to do with that pain of defeat, for one. As much as "Leaving orbit isn't evidence of defeat!" is under-interpreting the tap, "Tap means I'm better" is over-interpreting. There has to be that recognition that "Gym taps don't matter".

But "A tap is a tap. You can have your excuses, but we're not obligated to take them seriously" is the piece that keeps things honest, and it's what keeps a mutually respectful and humble equilibrium stable.
 

I think in most cases with public, online, asynchronous communication, it probably makes the most sense to just exit without a message about it.

In a minority of cases, though (e.g., where I've engaged in a series of back-and-forths and then abruptly stopped responding, or where someone asks me a direct Q or what-have-you), I find that I want an easy boilerplate way to notify others that I'm unlikely to respond more. I think "(Leaving orbit [LW · GW]. 🙂)" or similar solves that specific problem for me.

Why not say something like "hey, I'm bowing out of this conversation now, but it's not intended to be any sort of reflection on you or the topic, I'm not making a statement, I'm just doing what's good for me and that's all"?

That seems fine too, if I feel like putting the effort into writing a long thing like that, customizing it for the particular circumstances, etc. But I've noticed many times that it's a surprisingly large effort to hit exactly the right balance of social signals in a case like this, given what an important and commonplace move it is. (And I think I'm better than most people at wordsmithing this kind of thing, so if it's hard for me then I worry even more about a bunch of other people.)

Even just taking the time to include all the caveats and explanations can send the wrong signal -- can make a conversation feel more tense, defensive, adversarial, or hypercautious, since why else would you be putting so much work into clarifying stuff rather than just giving a chill 'bye now :)'?.

Avoiding that takes skill too. I think this is just a legit hard social thing to communicate. Having another tool in my toolbox that lets me totally ignore one of the most common difficult things to communicate seems great to me. :)

(And indeed, with your second paragraph I see that you're spotting some of the issues. We can just pre-despair of there being any possible solution to this, but also maybe the jargon would just work. We haven't tried, and jargon does sometimes just work.)