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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 think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans. The forum does not (yet) have the userbase numbers where permabans are favorable over longterm bans. If there were hundreds of users who ate bans and who would be expected to participate again, then permabans would be preferable, because no one wants to read one horrible comment every day from the returning exiled. But we don’t currently have that problem. Were Hylnka to be banned in 6month increments, we (1) sufficiently stave off the problem of bad content, because one bad comment every 6 months is entirely acceptable, and one bad monthly from ~6 banned longterm users is also acceptable; while importantly, (2) we benefit from the (perhaps) 20% chance that upon return the content follows the rules, especially because people generally become more pacified with age which increases the percent every iteration. If that 20% chance occurs, it’s a longterm supply of valuable contributions which are worth the few one-off bad comments you have to read before the correct dice roll. There’s also a unique benefit to forum culture for retaining those invested longterm.
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period. And an alternative safeguard for good content upon return would be to automatically delete every comment by the user upon hitting -2 points after 10min, for a set duration of time proportional to number of times automatic deletion of comment occurs.
This is my analysis, deontologists may disagree.
For whatever its worth, my suggestion for Hlynka's ban was "a year and a day," which was what we temporarily replaced permabans with back on the subreddit.
But I didn't argue strongly for it, because after we'd been doing 366 day bans for a little over a year, people started coming back... and they weren't any better than they'd been before. One theory had been that sometimes people get too caught up in whatever the $CURRENT_THING is, and we want to allow people to grow, and... to the best of my recollection, it has not ever worked out that way in the history of this community. People who did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans came back and... immediately did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans.
Permabans are not great, especially when we're actively looking for ways to grow the community (productively) rather than shrink it. But allowing long-time community members to actively degrade the discourse is, unfortunately, worse.
I understand that Christian caritas is not a guiding principle here, but from a secular perspective, I still value allowing people the opportunity to grow and improve, even if people rarely take it. It feels like the right thing to do. Humane.
I'm not a mod, I don't want to be a mod, but I've been mod-like elsewhere at times. I don't know you, but in your shoes I've felt weary; worn down. And who knows, maybe this is one of those cases where enforcing the line with one person can help others veer back before crossing the line themselves. @HlynkaCG would probably appreciate how that works. But I'll go on hoping for the mods to collectively show mercy, or grace, or something like that.
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If I really valued participating in a particular online community, I would eat a six-month ban, no problem. But I will absolutely stop participating in online communities if further participation is made conditional on grovelling to the jannies like this. There's a specific online community which I went on practically every day for the best part of a decade, and when they asked me to jump through this particular hoop I said fuck you, I'm out. I suspect I'm pretty close to the norm for the kind of person who participates in male-dominated online communities.
I remember getting banned from a forum when I was much younger. The policy there was 'after X amount of time you can write to the mods, admit you were wrong, and they will reinstate your account'. No way in hell I'd admit being wrong for what I considered an unjust banning.
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If some community was daft enough to demand me to perform penance in the form of 2 pages of essay homework, then leaving aside why I would want to come back, that's going straight to ChatGPT.
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I'm not entirely opposed to something like a rehabilitation program for rule breakers. In my experience the rule-breakers themselves are often very much not ok with such a system. I believe anyone that is capable of living in modern society and not constantly getting involved in violence and being thrown in prison is capable of filtering themselves. So most forum users are capable of filtering themselves, but they are not willing to filter themselves. So adding an external filter that is not under their control is not something they want, its just seen as an imposition.
I've wanted to do things like this in the past. But its not a good idea. We got a lot of complaints that we were just being petty tyrants abusing our power, and that we just wanted people to "bend the knee" and "respect my authoritaay!" And those complaints seem generally correct to me. Some of the libertarian types (myself included) have an allergic reaction to such requirements, and may swing much harder towards "fuck you and your impositions".
I'd rather just treat people like adults, rather than misbehaving kids. If you can't or aren't willing to control your behavior here then we should just part ways. I don't want to try and parent you. I don't want you ass kissing or crawling on your belly to be allowed back in. I just want you to act within the rules we have set out while you are here. That is my only requirement. And because it is the only requirement it becomes a much stronger one. There is no getting around it by willing to be a sycophant.
Having said all that nothing is forever set in stone. Hlynka could come back in a year. But it would have to be an active decision by the mod team. Not a passive one. And if it were to happen, I'd like to see the most reluctant members of the mod team and community convinced.
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My ideal moderation style would be something like your first and last suggestions, ‘problem users’ have a rolling 2 month ban window that is restarted immediately upon each infraction with no leeway or recourse unless they remain unbanned for - say - 18 months and then return to normal user status.
But I respect that the mods probably have better things to do than to nanny the most frequently reported users.
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I'd agree with 6-month bans; if people come back, they'll either improve, or they'll get in a couple of bad posts and get re-banned. Either way, it's not a huge strain on the forum.
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LLM go brrrr...
It has to be hand submitted, in fountain pen, at Zorba’s business address.
I would not recommend Zorba list his business address, it's liable to receive mail bombs.
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Good thing I own (way too many) fountain pens... Is their going to be a stipulation on what ink has to be used? I'm quite partial to Sailor Yama Dori and Diamine's Oxblood and for those days where I want a bit more shine to it, their Starlit Sea.
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