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Could we ban a popular user for once instead? Every non-janitorial moderator action I see these days just reinforces the same tiresome monoculture that makes people rightly talk about themotte as a basically ideologically monolithic/predictable entity. At this point we have wound up with one single community-scale trapped prior; "moderation follows community sentiment" by explicit statement and this sort of "if it makes too many people angry, it causes us work" reasoning, and community sentiment follows moderation by gradually evaporating people who don't like the prevailing view cluster, attracting people who like it and occasionally banning those who bump into the Overton window's frame too hard.
A two-week ban for every angry response would have been a better choice for the sake of the forum's long-term ability to fulfil its original purpose.
We didn't ban BC for making people angry. We banned him for wanting to make people angry. The original purpose of the Motte includes understanding the culture war, not waging it, and I think that this post was a pretty clear example of the latter.
Even that's not enough on its own. But it wasn't on it's own, since BC had such a long history. What do you do when someone repeatedly announces that he doesn't give a shit about your community norms? When his actions are consistently more inflammatory, more obnoxious than his peers? You start to think about showing him the door. Or, as cjet put it,
For what it's worth, when "popular" users actively fish for angry, knee-jerk responses, we do ban them, too. FarNearEverywhere is a good example.
I was hoping that I wouldn't need to dig up living examples of posters (because I think it just causes resentment and distrust - a bit of a sense of camaraderie is one of the things this place still has going for it), but how does e.g. this not fall under the category of wanting to make people angry? How does this wall of polemic and gaslighting word games not? Is it just because the people it would make angry are unlikely to be in the audience and stick their neck out? A rule that you can't make the people here angry but are free to do smug little victory dances where you dunk on groups that are not on the forum is also an obvious recipe for reinforcing any existing biases.
Go back to a time when community norms were actually applied in a way that got in a way of the victory-dancing for the dominant group, and you'll find plenty of declarations to the effect of not giving a shit about community norms too.
The ideological homogenization of the forum is not the sort of problem that can be solved without making representatives of the entrenched ideology angry. I want it to be solved, and don't think it can be done without either aggrieving them in any way that can be slipped past moderation (so its representatives feel less welcome and leave) or enforcing the rules on them evenly (so they behave in a way that is more likely to enable retention of other groups). Either way is bound to make them angry. Since we've established that I also want to make people angry, may I inquire about the resulting delta in my social credit score?
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The entire post is just a thinly-veiled sneer. It's not written to invite engagement, it's just written to spit on the outgroup and get a rise our of gullible/impulsive Mottizens. When I see that guy's username I can already predict the thrust of his posts. So I think mod action here is justified.
I do think we have too many right-wing drive-by shitposters, though. I imagine that the only reason they don't get modded more often is simply that they get reported way less. I admit I'm guilty of not reporting them simply because right-wing sneering is merely distasteful to me while left-wing sneering angers me.
I'll start trying to report low effort right-wing sneers more often.
ETA: I might be wrong here, but I think this would only partially fix the problem. The other half is that IME the average educated leftist* is very averse to exposure to heresy, hence TheSchism and the regular flameout posts in the vein of "I cannot in good conscience continue to post in a community that platform $BAD_THING." And so we mostly only have either long-suffering dissident leftists (thank you for your service!) or vindictive leftist trolls who quickly get banned. I think this is a broader cultural problem that can't be fixed without letting leftists police the boundaries of discussion which would defeat the purpose of this place.
*right-wingers are more heresy tolerant because they're bombarded with enemy propaganda 24/7; the polarity was different decades ago
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