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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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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:

  1. No one on this forum is infinitely excused of bad behavior. Having quality contributions and providing a unique viewpoint might get you some additional leeway, but our patience isn't unlimited.
  2. The mods do read and participate here. We know when someone is starting to abuse that leeway. We know when there is frustration about it.
  3. We do try to be deliberate and slow about things. It can feel real shitty when a cabal of people meet in secret to discuss your punishment and they decide permanent banishment is the solution. For longtime users that have put in the time and effort to be a part of the community here we don't lightly jump to permanent bans as a solution.

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.

I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans.

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.