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I'm not Amadan, but you tagged me, so I will point out that we actually tend to give much longer bans for straight up "fuck you"-type posts. In this case, Georgioz has an almost completely uninterrupted moderation record of several AAQCs. Because this is a reputation economy, we're much more likely to look at a user with a good record and say, "okay, not sure what's happening here, this person does not usually behave this way, maybe they are having a bad day" and we assign a lighter penalty than we normally would. If the behavior continues, the penalties do escalate!
The other half of this is that other people's bad behavior is never an excuse. The best way to respond will always be to respond within the remit of the rules; the second best thing to do is to not respond. When others are baiting you, dogpiling you, etc. remember that the goal is light, not heat, and responding to heat with heat only compounds the problem. We want to encourage discussion and we try to be reasonable about the fact that sometimes even productive discussions get a bit heated, but at some point we have to step in.
In this particular case, the penalties were light for both of you, which seems like the right call to me. These were "cool off" bans. But the length in part reflected your respective posting histories. This is the third time you've been moderated for letting people draw (or bait) you into a heated exchange. This is interesting to me in part because it suggests on the one hand that you are basically rule-abiding, which is great! But you seem to take other people's bad behavior as an excuse to respond in kind, but it's not.
More generally, this advice probably applies as much in life as on the Motte: if someone drops a "FUCK YOU" in your direction, unless you have an extremely solid plan for rapid de-escalation, you are almost certainly best off to disengage immediately.
EDIT: Looks like Amadan responded while I was thinking about this, so, there you go.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond. And I basically agree with the stance as you've described it.
I just object to stuff like this:
You previously correctly called me out for this, and I modified my behaviour to not do this. When georgioz said "FUCK YOU", I didn't respond in kind.
I took your previous advice, as incredibly frustrating as that was. But you're still treating my behaviour as if I'm just going maximum heat in response to bait, which I'm not.
I agree with the reputation system, but it's absurd that it stretches to treating "FUCK YOU" + "you are stupid and simple and can't read" (not a quote) as equivalent to some calm, reactive condescension.
What I am trying to communicate is that the length of the ban is not strictly determined by the specific offense, so you are drawing a false equivalence in your perception of the ban lengths in this case. They are incommensurable.
Basically, you seem to be saying "georgioz got off light!" And we are saying, "yeah, he's a really good poster normally, so we let him off light this time, hopefully he was just having a bad day."
Or maybe instead you're saying, "I was punished too heavily!" Maybe so? But you admit you were engaged in condescension, despite it being reactive, and reactivity is exactly what you've been moderated for in the past. It's true that we frown heavily on telling other users to "fuck off." But that doesn't mean we don't frown on users for less vulgar ad hominem attacks.
I would just encourage you to not read too much into the precise length of anyone's bans, yours or others. It's not a science. It's just feedback.
I was previously modded for reacting with excessive heat.
When georgioz says "FUCK YOU", and I overlook it with nothing more than an "excuse me", I'm clearly not doing the same kind of reactivity as you've previously called out. I'm demonstrating a pretty significant level of restraint and non-reactivity.
(Also, "ad hominem"? I was condescending, but I didn't substitute insult for argument.)
No, I'm not. I am criticising the kind of moderation policy that leads to this outcome. People are absolutely going to compare bans, and it's unreasonable to just declare that it's some kind of fallacy to do so.
No, you know exactly what I'm saying: these bans are absurd and unjust, relative to each other. Declaring the two incommensurable doesn't retroactively change what I'm saying.
Reputation should only go so far. If someone can scream "FUCK YOU" at me, and tell me I'm simple and stupid and illiterate, it's a crappy moderation policy that gives me the same punishment for not being an unlimited punching bag.
Well yes, that too!
I agree that you showed some restraint. But you still wrote a rule-breaking post, and that's what counted against you here.
Ad hominem literally translates "to the man." Its use here identifies your excessive focus on georgioz and his characteristics, to the detriment of your engagement with the substance of your argument. When we talk about ad hominem in the context of moderation, it is not an academic critique of your grasp of informal reasoning, but rather a suggestion that you should spend less time casting aspersions on your interlocutor and more time addressing the substance of your discussion.
(Fun fact: I am a philosophy professor. I make my living, in part, teaching both formal and informal reasoning!)
I see. Well, it's an unforced error to insist on things that "I know" when I have not told you that I know them; as a rule, I am not hiding the ball on that. I can be mistaken. We can disagree. But I'm not pretending, and now you're making the same mistake with me as you made with georgioz.
But now that you've spelled it out more clearly, okay! You don't like the way we moderate based in part on reputation, as it sometimes leads to results that offend your sense of fair play. Your complaint has been noted. In hopes of managing your expectations: so far, the moderation team does not agree with your position on the matter, and has no plans to adjust our moderation approach in response to your complaints at this time.
No, this isn't what I said. I absolutely think reputation should be a factor. I'm suggesting that in this case, it's being used excessively.
That's my point! My comments were full of addressing the substance of the discussion.
I'm fairly sure you don't actually know that I had an excessive focus on georgioz and his characteristics. I suspect you're assuming it from a light skim of the conversation, without really reading what I was saying in detail.
Which is reasonable! I know that reading through the comments in detail is a massive chore for mods. I don't expect you to do it. But now you're telling me that I was fixated on georgioz, and spending lots of time throwing insults and aspersions at him, and that's not true.
Fair enough; I retract that. I felt it was reasonable that you would've understood that my complaint was the relative length of the bans -- otherwise I don't see why you'd bring up their supposed incommensurability -- but if you're telling me that wasn't clear, I accept that.
Sure. At the risk of making another unforced error: I strongly doubt you're saying this to manage my expectations. I think you're doing a little snarky put-down.
And that's fine! It's even kind of funny; from your perspective, I am being a pain. But we could maybe be a little more consistent on whether being condescending is against the rules or not.
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