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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period.

If I really valued participating in a particular online community, I would eat a six-month ban, no problem. But I will absolutely stop participating in online communities if further participation is made conditional on grovelling to the jannies like this. There's a specific online community which I went on practically every day for the best part of a decade, and when they asked me to jump through this particular hoop I said fuck you, I'm out. I suspect I'm pretty close to the norm for the kind of person who participates in male-dominated online communities.

I remember getting banned from a forum when I was much younger. The policy there was 'after X amount of time you can write to the mods, admit you were wrong, and they will reinstate your account'. No way in hell I'd admit being wrong for what I considered an unjust banning.

If some community was daft enough to demand me to perform penance in the form of 2 pages of essay homework, then leaving aside why I would want to come back, that's going straight to ChatGPT.