The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?
The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?