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Originally Posted by browser2920
It is not acceptable to have posters write posts about other posters such as "joe blow is a pompous, narcissistic ass..." or words to that effect. And that was the entire content of these posts.
I think you misunderstand me. Your quoted passage is clearly in violation of the normal Rule 1 of the forums. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't have deleted that poster at minimum. But it needs no more than Rule 1 to delete it, and you don't need to hint at new standards to delete.
I don't actually think your quoted passage is a "habit" of the forum, it seems clearly egregious. What I'm worried about with your "habit" comment is for far less egregious comments. The part that is a "habit" on the forum - something I don't think is necessarily bad - is because a lot of posters have long posting histories to each we might contrast a current position with a prior position. Resolving these kinds of tensions are something this forum can do that so many more ephemerous social media types often don't do. It can be done well, it can be done poorly, but it isn't a priori bad.
One thing to be on the lookout in your thinking about moderation is that instead of trying to justify positions by the worst possible examples, try justifying it with far less egregious cases. All the hardest decisions happen on margins. Take this, for instance:
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Please do not think that my purpose or goal here is to ensure that everything continues to function exactly as it has been, and to avoid making changes because they may make a handful of posters uncomfortable. It isn't. I have gone out of my way to seek out and consider user inputs as I make changes. I appreciate that there is some "institutional knowledge" that I don't have. But OTOH, there are certain current behaviors that are unacceptable from my day one, so there is no point in my waiting a few weeks to pull those scabs off. My opinion on making gratuitous, derogatory comments about other members rather than addressing the actual thread topic at hand, will not change. So I will not be slowing down in areas like that. The sooner we get those areas cleaned up, the better.
This kind of my-way-or-the-highway rhetoric might sound great in your mind when you are thinking about extreme examples of "gratuitous, derogatory comments" where you are unlikely to find any pushback here. But I think it will be worth trying to contemplate how that same rhetoric sounds when considering cases on the margin, where lots of people might disagree on whether something is or is not sufficiently gratuitous. My suggestion that you slow down, that you try posting some actual politics, that you build some rapport among the posters here before swiftly acting is targeted towards those types of cases.