okay hmm i've never tried to articulate any of this in writing before
i think what goes wrong in most unpleasant / unproductive group conversations in practice is that something is happening that most of the group is not bought into but they don't know how to change it
Conversation
the simplest example is one person dominating the conversation: interrupting a lot, not allowing others to interrupt them, but also subtler stuff around implicitly setting the topic, setting the agenda, setting the frame, etc.; most people don't know how to talk about this ime
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but there are trickier examples that are really about the group dynamic and not localized to one person, like everyone's talking about a topic they're not really into but everyone thinks everyone else is into it so no one is willing to change it
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i have a decent amount of experience playing around with unusual formats for group conversation like circling, authentic relating, etc. and one of the many things i learned from those formats is how little agency many people feel around changing the dynamic of a conversation
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this is related to a thing i see happen on twitter where people feel like twitter is something that just happens to them and not an experience they can actively shape by changing who they follow, what they tweet about, *how* they tweet vibe-wise, etc. etc. etc. etc.
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anyway there are in fact many conversational options for interrupting and changing the flow of a group conversation and you can get more skilled at using these without unnecessarily harshing the vibe. some examples:
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1) someone (usually male) is dominating the conversation and preventing other shyer people (often female) from speaking up. there are better and worse ways to handle this. i do not recommend the "call-out" option where you berate them for being bad
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options for handling this depend a lot on the context of the conversation, e.g. i would do different things in a chill hangout with friends vs. something more like a business meeting. but you can e.g. unobtrusively encourage quieter people to speak up
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like "hey, X, what were you saying before...?" (you don't even say "...before you got interrupted by Y", this can be very gentle)
obviously this sort of thing works better the more comfortable you feel wielding social power in the group
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i would call that social power, maybe "feminine social power" specifically 😛
here is a really concrete metric for (an aspect of) the thing i'm talking about: when X person starts talking, how likely is everyone else to interrupt them?
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