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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.
In this thread: users asking why now, what was so bad about recent actions, is there a possibility for leniency.
Also in this thread: users rejoicing like the UK on Thatcher's death.
I'm going to provide a little more context in hopes of reconciling these two extremes. If nothing else, it'll serve as a eulogy for a guy I genuinely respect.
Over the last week, the mod queue saw a lot of action. And after any of us cleared out the obvious warnings and bans, there were always multiple comments from Hlynka left sitting at the bottom. Turds on the doorstep.
He was last banned two months ago for this turd. Before that it was a different driveby. Before that, another. And another. And another.
At the same time, Hlynka reliably generated a lot of actual contributions. I'm not just talking about the quality stuff, though there was plenty of that. (Notice, also, how that last one leads to throwing shade at Nybbler. Some things are eternal.) No, I mean the fact that Hlynka could be relied upon to show up, present his ideas, and poke holes in others--maybe even with some tact. He provided real value to the Motte. He kept doing so up until his ban, so long as you steered clear of the wrong topics. Hell, with the appropriate encouragement, he remained perfectly capable of giving a level-headed defense on those topics, too, once he stripped out the call-outs and persecution complex.
But as time has passed, those topics have gotten more and more attention. I couldn't say whether that represents a shift in the Discourse, in the makeup of our userbase, or in Hlynka himself. At the very least, there is a nasty little feedback loop where his reputation as a partisan strangles productive discussion in the cradle. You could basically guarantee that if he wrote anything about race, half a dozen users would show up to fight, and vice versa.
So here we are. Warnings have done next to nothing. Bans have failed to leave a lasting reminder. They've worked well as a cooldown period, but Hlynka doesn't really need that--he's perfectly capable of switching modes and writing a nice comment about movies or sports or the Fermi paradox or another user's excellent story. That's Hlynka.
I'll miss his work.
Half a dozen kids beating up another kid in the playground. Happens every day for two weeks. Principle decides that they can stop all of these disturbances by just dispelling the one kid getting beat up. After all, that's less disruptive than dispelling six kids, or seven.
If you're aware of the pattern and the community it leaves you with after pursuing it iteratively for years, and are accepting that intentionally as still the best solution to a hard problem, fine.
If you're not aware of it and the community it produces, you kind of need to be.
Not sure how far this metaphor stretches.
Some degree of roughhousing is expected here. But once one kid pulls a knife, nothing good will come of it. So the school policy punishes knife-wielding harder than it punishes fistfights, even though the most desperate kid probably isn’t the one who started it.
That’s melodramatic, but I’m trying to distinguish between choosing to punish the one student because it’s easier and choosing it because it’s fair. Yes, the student is denied his great equalizer, because the world where everyone pulls a knife is worse.
I don’t like it either, recognizing the perverse incentives. My consolation is that the bullies don’t have a great track record with knives, even when they aren’t being threatened. That gives me some hope that the system will continue to select for a better community in the long run.
The point is that one side has disseminated rulebreaking, because there are a lot of them. Hlynka had concentrated rulebreaking, because there was one of him. Take the bottom percentile of shitty posts distributed across a dozen people and always direct them towards Hlynka. If he were to respond in kind, he'd eventually eat a permaban while the others would take a day here or there.
I've studiously ignored every single one of the threads he would get involved in, so you and the other mods know the situation much better than me. That being said, the forum is a worse place without Hlynka. This is how you end up with conformity and groupthink even with neutral and fairly-applied rules.
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