Comment by tsukikage
3 years ago
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community mores and calmly wrapping complaints about any pushback in reasonable-sounding phrases to completely destroy such a space. I've seen this happen entirely too often :(
they tend to be small and ephemeral
I'm part of two such communities that each have tens of thousands of active members, and have both been online for at least 15 years.
Generalizations are rarely accurate.
HN is a good example of where the moderation works to a large extent, but it has trade offs that can be extremely problematic.
For example, politically charged discourse is suppressed. That's going to result in a higher level of civility, but now you have a large community of people with an impaired ability to affect the political process.
"If I can't be politically charged on HN, I won't be politically charged anywhere"
Politically-charged or at least on the wrong side of the line. HN does tend to discourage a lot of low effort flamebait which is generally for the good. But even politely-made minority arguments can easily be downvoted as well.
Only if the moderators are idiots. Which most moderators are not: if one person is the bulk of complaints, then that person is the problem not everybody else.
Trusting in the moderators to not "be idiots" - not make decisions you wouldn't - is a bit like trusting in benevolent dictatorship as a form of government: it works great, right up until it doesn't.
Your point doesn't negate the parent's point. It still stands.
Is that always true? If this person is a minority and people are harassing them, for example? Do you remove them for the same if community cohesion or force the community to be more accepting?
Are you assuming that the moderator can’t actually see the harassment?
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