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As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
Please keep any discussion civil.
I would be a lot less frustrated over this if the group here hadn't done the following:
Allow a community of like minded people to congregate on /r/themotte
Encourage those people to leave
Lock the door behind them once they do
Maybe you don't like hylnka, but a lot of people did. The whole pitch on moving everybody here was that we could avoid the overbearing influence of reddit admins, but now we just have...you guys.
Hylnka was a dick, and banned me at least once on themotte...but as I have pointed out before: you guys (specifically you, cjet) over way overtending this garden. Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another. Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
Here's a suggestion for how to improve themotte and course correct it: give us something like "showdead" on hacker news. Give me the option in my userprofile to have a non mod curated experience where I can see naughty posts and interact with them. People who want the more curated experience can untick this "show naughty" option, and never have to see it. I don’t think you will do this since it takes the power of being a mod away (although keeps the practical purpose), but it would be appreciated.
I don't think this is an entirely baseless claim, but I do think the mods generally do a great job of modding for tone and not content, which is what we want from them. This is the only public forum I'm aware of where Nazis and progressives both make regular contributions to the discussion. We want to curate and preserve a space for that kind of ideological diversity, and if the cost of that is that the tone of the average post becomes somewhat more stilted, then that's an acceptable loss. A complete withdrawal of moderation would lead to people with minority viewpoints self-selecting out of the discussion even more than they already have.
Many of the regulars were posting here before ChatGPT (or even before GPT-3).
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