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I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.
I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.
Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?
Looking at the mod log, I think his most recent ban was for two weeks, so it would still have been a pretty substantial step up, six times as long (though maybe one of the others was longer, I didn't look).
I don't know, when people are willing to talk, and seem sincere (which seemed to me to be the case here), it seems reasonable to set cap bans at a few years.
Even if you end up needing to ban them again years down the line, there's a difference in messaging between "you'd be welcome back later, if only you can behave" and "leave, and never come back," and the former seems better. Even if the one in question isn't likely to listen, it sends the message better to everyone else that it isn't about personal antagonism.
Or so it seems to me, but you surely have the experience I do not.
(this is not to say that I disagree that the comment was pretty bad)
Well, maybe. Back on the subreddit, for a while Zorba set a cap of 1 year on bans. We still perma'd spammers and the like, but the idea (IIRC, this was a while ago) was basically that most users who eat a 1 year ban just won't ever come back, and those who do may very well have changed for the better in the interim. What actually happened was, the best posters who ate a 1 year ban just never came back, while the worst posters did come back, as bad as ever--or worse!
At that point the "perma" slowly crept back in, partly because, as it turns out, there's not really any such thing as a user ban--only an identity ban. On reddit, anyone was free to roll up a new user account at any time. We have a few more tools available here on the Motte, but still it's the case that a determined user could probably find a way to roll a fresh alt. There are costs to that--posts have to be manually approved for a while, for example--but a permaban doesn't strictly mean that a person has been kicked off the site. Rather, in this reputation economy they lose the benefits of being a known quantity. And a new user with no reputation has a harder time getting away with the kind of posts that degrade discourse.
It's far from a perfect system--and even here away from reddit, as a moderator my actual options for responding to posts are extremely limited. I've got a carrot that many people don't care about (AAQC reports) and two sticks (warnings and bans). Beyond that, the only way I can hope to modify anyone's behavior is through direct appeal, which takes a lot of time and doesn't always land the way I want it to.
In the instant case, the user just had a long string of bad posts uninterrupted with anything like an AAQC or other valuable contribution. We don't like to lose interesting perspectives, but at some point the amount of harm someone like that does to the discourse just becomes more than the mod team thinks it's worth.
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In case anyone's wondering about this ban, the real reason is that fuckduck got into a fight with a mod the other day, but the clique needed another excuse to ban him.
I probably should have made an alt account to say this, because now I'll probably get perma'ed for misusing an apostrophe next week or something.
Edit: called it https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184547?context=8#context
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