He did it with the intention of driving away people from the community. Doing things with the intention of weeding out people is well described as harassment.
It’s good for the forum to drive some people out. The question is in correctness of particular decisions about driving people out and in acceptability of means of doing so. Applying the concept of harassment is misleading (noncentral), as it suggests incorrect conclusions (e.g. driving people out is undesirable in general), even if some of the other conclusions happen to be correct (e.g. disapproval of Eugine’s behavior).
(One currently accepted method of deciding to drive a user out is to see if most of their comments are significantly downvoted by many users, and if they keep posting similar stuff regardless. If that’s the case, their comments start getting deleted, which is a means of driving them out or motivating them to reduce active participation.)
That is likely to be true, but I’d argue that it’s not good for the forum if a single self-selected mostly-anonymous person is the only one deciding who gets driven out.
‘Single’ implies that consensus among the community is not required; ‘self-selected’ implies that anyone with an end goal different to that of the site can attempt to force their goal on the community; mostly-anonymous implies a lack of accountability for their decisions. These are all red flags.
It’s good for the forum to drive some people out. The question is in correctness of particular decisions about driving people out and in acceptability of means of doing so. Applying the concept of harassment is misleading (noncentral), as it suggests incorrect conclusions (e.g. driving people out is undesirable in general), even if some of the other conclusions happen to be correct (e.g. disapproval of Eugine’s behavior).
(One currently accepted method of deciding to drive a user out is to see if most of their comments are significantly downvoted by many users, and if they keep posting similar stuff regardless. If that’s the case, their comments start getting deleted, which is a means of driving them out or motivating them to reduce active participation.)
That is likely to be true, but I’d argue that it’s not good for the forum if a single self-selected mostly-anonymous person is the only one deciding who gets driven out.
‘Single’ implies that consensus among the community is not required; ‘self-selected’ implies that anyone with an end goal different to that of the site can attempt to force their goal on the community; mostly-anonymous implies a lack of accountability for their decisions. These are all red flags.
Yeah, I believe even the signal to noise crowd is generally opposed to individual karma bombing.