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Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee", and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye. Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?
Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism", so it was decided that he would go away to reduce the potential of theMotte.org getting caught up in Trump-related drama.
You do not know what you're talking about.
TheMotte is rationalist-adjacent because of our origins, but we (and especially the mod team) are not enforcing some kind of "rationalist consensus" on anything, least of all race and IQ. Hylnka was very open about his disdain for HBD and HBD posters. Most of the mods are also critical of it and HBD obsessives to varying degrees. What consensus were we trying to enforce?
Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.
This was officially the post that finally earned him a permaban, but it was really an accumulation of posting over months and months, during which we repeatedly asked him to stop doing that (I mean, we literally told him "Please stop doing this or eventually we will have to permaban you and we really don't want to do that"!)
No. He did argue with us in DMs, but it was not much different from what he was saying in public: that we should be quicker to ban people and we should especially ban the people he didn't like, and police the place up more. Meanwhile he'd continue aggressively attacking the people we weren't banning.
That's, uh, quite a theory all right. I know of no such discussions among the mods, and if Hylnka has become a public figure under another name I am unaware of it. And of all the regular or former motteposters who might draw the Eye of Sauron on us, Hlynka wouldn't be in my top 10.
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God damn those are great threads, I am sad I missed them. Thanks for the write up, it does look like breaking with the hbd consensus was instrumental in his ban - not as a reason, but it's still part of the why.
Although there is variation in the opinions of individual mods, my impression of them as a group is that they certainly have no interest in enforcing an “HBD consensus” (in either direction).
Tequila didn't say the mods enforced the hbd consensus he said unofficially hlynka got banned for breaking with the hbd consensus. Despite his contrariness he was still a member of this community and despite his cynicism it seems he couldn't tolerate the community converging on something he found so immoral. It was the reason he decided it wasn't worth playing by the rules to whatever extent he had been before.
My opinion (which I think I shared at the time) was that he got banned for a combination of "breaking with the HBD consensus" in the form of wrangling with many/most of the actual neo-Nazis around here, and being a bit of a cantankerous fuck who posts a lot -- which (the latter) provided lots of opportunity for said Nazis to report him for technically correct but minor rule violations which would have otherwise flown under the radar.
The reports-volume-based moderation strategy is fundamentally flawed when it comes to high-volume cantankerous posters, and I say this as somebody who was banned more than once by Hlynka for cantankerous wrangling, and kind of pissed off about it in the moment.
Yeah that's pretty much how I see it too, and those technically correct objections feel like the trap snapping shut when you are particularly aggravated - otherwise why not a more substantial response (autism just feels like another cop out when you are in that frame of mind) - and if you don't recognise that (hell, sometimes even if you do) you can break out the big guns and sink yourself further.
Lol I should probably also say, in case anyone thinks I'm trying to rewrite history and jump on a bandwagon, that hlynka and I didn't start off well at all either, he called me the worst poster on the mod more than once and I think I told him that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire at one point. And I have no idea if his opinion of me ever changed, but I also don't care. I grew to like him as a user, I think the demodding changed his perspective and sharpened his skill at argument, and I don't need reciprocation.
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This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.
@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.
To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.
A third option is to enforce the rules, but not via permabans.
Permabans should be reserved for the most egregious trolls, spambots, or accounts that are otherwise doing harm to the forum in some way. The way I see it, there’s almost never a reason to permaban a good faith poster (which Hlynka obviously was). I would set the maximum suspension length somewhere in the range of 6-12 months.
Yeah, I'd be happy to see him return.
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Yeah, I'll +1 on this. Permabans seem unnecessary, and even stranger in light of the old "a permaban is no more than 1 year long, ackshully" rule, that we used to have, but dispensed with for some reason.
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I liked Hlynka but my biggest issue with him was when people would respond to him with specific arguments and he would completely ignore them and/or refuse to address them
Yeah, he'd had some pretty bad threads before he was banned.
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Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers, to the point they won't tolerate dissent. I like a good conspiracy theory, but come up with one that makes some sense.
Also, why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?
Because that comment never came up in the discussion.
Members of the mod team did endorse the harassment of him for his views on IQ as "providing a valuable public service".
Ymeshkout hasn't been an active moderator for as long as I can remember, not even in the private mod discord. He had nothing to do with Hlynka's ban.
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I was surprised ymeshkout is even a mod. You can see how active he was after the move offsite here. And the post you linked to (without context, for some reason) is in response of a mod who declared said activity to be harrasment in the first place!
Neither did the ones you linked to, that's not an excuse.
Sorry, i thought i had provided the full link.
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