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Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
filippo@abyssdomain.expert ("Filippo Valsorda") wrote:

There's a bit of commotion on Lobsters because an unpleasant-but-technically-correct user finally got banned, and I realized that an unpopular opinion of mine is that moderators are always right.

I don't care about the letter of the CoC. I don't care about transparency, even. Moderation is the fundamentally human and nuanced big-picture job that shapes a community.

Almost nobody gets banned for a single post. A couple SEO or startup spammers, a couple real ugly and obvious trolls. Everything else is about a pattern of abuse. So there’ll be a string of comments or stories removed over time, sometimes additional attempts from mods to start conversations via site DM, IRC, etc. that won’t be visible in the modlog. I think it might’ve been a mumble chat that prompted the experiment you linked. This pattern was that every couple years there’d be a long string of cruel, dismissive, or discouraging comments. Not necessarily wrong, not outright abusive, not spam, not any one over the line, but all of them… just endless “ugh, this guy again?” and other users, more or less quietly, leaving rather than deal with it. This final comment called out in the modlog is one more example.