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Inflammatory comments and shorthand integration-by-reference hinder the ability to create a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
That's the goal--it's right there at the top of the page! Of course, the community is what it is; personalities and culture and such are bound to develop and play a part. The goal of moderation is to do what we can to preserve the foundation in the face of that.
Absolutely! Ban everyone (other than the Nazi-hobbyists with the time on their hands to couch their points in interminable gish-gallops) and you will not have anymore inflammatory comments to deal with! (tappinghead.gif)
Keep up the good work guys.
The mods were just following orders. Is it really anybody's fault that no one but Nazis can seem to follow pretty simple rules?
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Do you think @JTarrou should not have been banned?
If you think the modding was correct, then what is your complaint?
If you think the modding was incorrect, then explain why.
I think that @JTarrou's comment made a valid well articulated point relevant to the discussion -- my point to you is that if you continue nannying people's speech patterns you will soon enough be moderating a forum mainly consisting of polite and long-winded Nazis, because (for whatever reason) they seem to be the only ones currently willing to put in the effort to self-police their speech to the extent that they aren't catching regular bans.
If this is what you and @naraburns feel 'the foundation' of the place is (and Zorba presumably agrees) then so be it -- but it seems to me that things have drifted very far from what it was, and I think it has accelerated lately in large part due to an increase in the specific form of moderation that you are engaging in at the moment.
I don't think our moderation has changed, I know our rules haven't, and clearly it is not just Nazis who are able to write effortful posts without catching bans.
We've been hearing "You guys are ruining this place with your nannying speech patterns" since before we left reddit.
Not from me you haven't -- the frequency of it has markedly increased lately, whether due to the additional manpower on the mod squad or a shift in tolerance IDK, but the place is changing under our feet and not for the better.
Anyways look at the results and ask yourself the question about your rules bringing you to this -- what good did this ban do the forum?
We always ask that question. This is not the first time a well-liked and generally positive contributor has been (temporarily) banned. This is also not the first time that @JTarrou, specifically, has been banned. At one point he even wrote a long post about how he expected to get permabanned, no hard feelings, because he just couldn't comply with the rules about not shitting on his outgroup.
I realize there is a substantial contingent here who would like people to be allowed to post freely about how women are hypergamous bots, blacks are low IQ crime-monsters, Jews are invidious parasites, libtards should all be given helicopter rides, etc. etc. If that is the forum you would like, advocate for that but be clear about it. Maybe if that's what everyone wants, we will change our moderation and let the shit fly. But until now, the consensus has been that that is not what (most) people want, and hence that's why we mod people who cannot keep their seething hatred in check when posting. It's not like you aren't allowed to talk about women, blacks, Jews, liberals, etc., in a negative fashion. @JTarrou wasn't confused or caught unawares at crossing some invisible line he didn't understand. He knew what he was doing because he's done it (and been warned about it) before. So have 90% of our regulars who get rapped for breaking the rules, no matter how much they complain about it.
That said, sometimes there are phases where the mods all happen to be moderating more strictly or less strictly for a while. It's usually not an intentional or coordinated thing (we have not had a "reign of terror" recently, and no plans to do so). Remember those? When the forum would get so heated and antagonistic that we had to start issuing bans even for small infractions to get people to chill out? Some people thought that was necessary and some people hated it. Usually the people who hated it were the ones who wanted to shit on others. If you think we've been stricter lately, maybe it's because people have been shittier lately.
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