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Jon Ericson takes the opposite position: find the miscreants as quickly as possible. My thinking has been heavily influenced by this philosophy of moderation written by the late Shamus Young. A ...
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#1: Initial revision
by
Michael
·
2023-10-23T14:12:46Z (about 1 year ago)
Jon Ericson [takes the opposite position][jle]: find the miscreants as quickly as possible. > My thinking has been heavily influenced by [this philosophy of moderation][sy] written by the late Shamus Young. A key quote: > > > Instead of making rules to compel crazies to behave – which can become a full-time enforcement project – I allow them to act out. And then I ban them. I want to know who the crazy people are, as fast as possible. The sooner they reveal their character, the sooner I can pull them out of the pool before they make a mess. This isn’t hard. Problem People are usually easy to spot. > > Another way to put it is that moderators have the site rules/guidelines as tools designed to be a standard of behavior. But if people are breaking the community without breaking the rules, we don't need to just throw up our hands. I strongly suspect a few people (maybe as few as one) cause most of the problems on most sites. I might have a hard time sorting things out because there are a lot of accusations being thrown around. Just because someone breaks the rules sometimes doesn't mean they incapable of being decent members of the community. I understand that the problem you describe is that it's annoying to repeatedly find _the same person_ again and again, but I submit that it's still better to find them unambiguously than it is to rules-lawyer them into misbehaving in a way that's harder to detect. [jle]: https://jlericson.com/2023/10/07/find_the_jack.html [sy]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19709