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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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To clear up some things:


You are not getting any form of special leniency.

What I was trying to say is that there is a law of large numbers effect going on. If user A and user B both have about a 1% rate of a rule breaking post. But user A writes 1000 posts and user B only writes 10 posts then user A is way more likely to get in trouble and get banned. We don't want this outcome, so we will try and get a sense of the rate of violation (that 1% number).


Having upsetting beliefs is allowed, because to do otherwise creates a failure mode for all discussions.

There are often times where someone comes in and makes a post with clearly upsetting beliefs. Sometimes that person is a Nazi, one time that person was someone that believed child molestation should be allowed, most times it's just a belief that your political opponents should suffer (and some of those political opponents are on this discussion board).

What then happens is someone makes it personal or attacks them "you are a Nazi scumbag" or "you should be castrated". They then get banned. It looks like we allowed trolls to bait a response and get someone kicked out.

The simple alternative to this is topic bans of anything that might upset a bunch of users. This is the alternative that most of the leftist web embraced in the mid 2010's. The leftists then weaponized this, and got most topics that they didn't like banned from their spaces.

We don't do topic bans. We've tried to find another approach where we don't ban any topics but we try to find etiquette rules where people don't write the original post in the most inflammatory way possible.


We do not like permabans. They are an option of last resort.

I think we average like one, maybe two permabans a year for power users. They are rare. They are often proceeded by a dozen or more warnings and tempbans and usually a complete lack of quality contributions. The mods usually have multi day long discussions and usually we have full consensus before we carry it out.

A one day ban like this would not sway anything in regards to a permaban decision.


You are not my enemy, and neither are most users. Some users choose to be our enemies.

They mostly are not a good fit for this forum and they want us to do things differently. Usually not enforce rules against them or their allies, or enforce extra rules against their other enemies. Their method to get changes to happen is often to badger us and annoy us anytime we do our standard duties. And undermine anything we do. Their feedback is always "this ban is bad", and thus their feedback is useless as a comparative barometer.

The most mature of users who don't fit do not become our enemies, instead they voluntarily leave. Sometimes they will ask us for a permaban that we will grant to them.

Those that stay and cause trouble like to be rules lawyers and twist everything we say against us. It's exhausting and annoying, which is their exact goal. The more annoying it is for us to conduct moderation the less we will do of it. I have no doubt that I will regret writing some part of this open view into moderation here. Maybe I'll tag you when it happens to show you what I mean.