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Can you explain? Basically, I imagine we want moderation to improve themotte (ie increase quality conversation and decrease non-quality conversation). If a statement increases quality conversations, why are we trying to remove?
I guess one could imagine where it directly increases quality conversation by X and indirectly decreases quality conversation by X+N but that seems like a rather big leap.
If someone posted "You are a Nazi, fuck off and die," and somehow that spawned a really interesting thread about Nazis and online discourse or whatever, would you argue that we should not mod the original comment?
If your answer is "Yes," well, too bad, that is not the "instrumental" approach we take.
If someone posts a bad comment, but the thread it spawns is good, it's still a bad comment. And then the next time someone else posts a similar bad comment and we mod it, that person will argue that our modding is inconsistent, and we'll have people arguing whether the ensuing discussion was "good" enough to justify the comment. I wouldn't put it past some of our bad actors to post all their CW-bait trolling comments when they think the mods are asleep, in the hopes that by the time we read the reports, it will have spawned "interesting" discussion and thus be proof against modding. So no, we're not inviting people to game the system with "If you post something inflammatory and culture warring but it starts a good discussion you can get away with it."
This is not new. This is how we have always modded. It has happened multiple times in the past that a comment that was borderline or just wasn't looked at very closely started a long, arguably good thread, with AAQCs even, and then a mod came in a day or two later and banned the OP.
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