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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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As a moderator I'm typically trying to sort people into three buckets:

  1. Worthless contributor, actively negative, pisses people off, very unlikely to improve.
  2. Net neutral. Upsets some, but others like them around. Can maybe improve.
  3. Quality poster. Follows the rules, adds to discussion, says interesting things, doesn't need to improve.

People in group 1 we generally want to ban. If you are going to self label yourself into that category, then no amount of following the strict letter of the rules will save you. We have a wildcard rule for a reason.

I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a rules lawyer. If we thought it would be useful we'd probably only have the wildcard rule. In some sense the rules don't matter. They are guidelines for behavior.

Did they violate an explicit guideline? No. Did they violate the only guideline that really matters? Yes. Deleting their comment was an improvement over leaving it up. But they are letting me know what kind of contributor they are. And I don't see any reason to hobble myself in figuring out which bucket users fall into.