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Notes -
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
I think the moderation is just fine. The Kulak example you gave is actually one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen while debating on the internet. Seriously, I've been writing and debating on various internet forums for decades now. I don't think I've ever before seen a heated argument get started, the mods say "knock it off you two", followed by both posters apologizing for overreacting and restating reasonable points in a calm and civilized manner. Fucking magic!
I actually still remember to this day, one time like 10 or 15 years ago, I got in an argument/discussion with somebody on some forum, I think it was Slashdot. They were very hostile and insulting and I remained calm and reasonable. After 2 or 3 exchanges, I asked him why he was being so hostile and insulting when I hadn't insulted him once and he actually calmed down some and apologized. Not mentioning that to make myself sound awesome or anything, but to say that it's really remarkable and rare to actually move conversations from hostility back to calm and reasonable discussion.
Burdensomcount is the only one on your list who got a harsh-ish punishment. But the explanation from FCfromSSC seems quite reasonable. I don't have access to mod notes and I don't follow everything that goes on here in enough detail to know stuff like that, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation.
In every listed case, the mods have calmly and patiently explained their position, even restating it multiple times in multiple places for the benefit of people who could plausibly be claimed to be behaving disingenuously. 99% of the internet that's moderated gets "Fuck off, troll! ::clicks permaban button::" to that behavior.
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