Comment by VancouverMan
9 months ago
Based on what I've seen, various forms of censorship and suppression are often employed in such cases, rather than outright "flaming" or other discussion-based approaches.
It really depends on where and how the discussion is taking place, and what censorship methods the website/platform/medium involved offers.
Sometimes users are just outright banned or shadow-banned, if those happen to be options.
Sometimes forum threads, bug reports, or comments are deleted.
Sometimes the discussion remains accessible, but is stifled in some way. This includes closing/locking forum threads or bug reports, or otherwise severely limiting participation in such discussions to a very small and isolated group of people. If down-voting/reporting systems are present, sometimes they're used to limit the visibility or prominence of such discussion.
Ok, do you have a concrete example of this?
I haven't rigorously tracked all of the instances I've seen of this happening over the years, but I've tried to quickly find some more prominent examples for you.
This bug report, for example, has various "This comment has been minimized.", "rust-lang deleted a comment from ...", "rust-lang locked and limited conversation to collaborators" interference:
https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation
Thank you very much for digging these up. I don't have anything more to add these are good examples of bad behavior.