The moderator may be reacting to a pattern that’s clearly ban-worthy, but nonetheless hard to verbalize exactly, and thus misreport their real reason. Verbal reporting is hard.
This. If I read the ban announcement legalistically, I disagree with it. But if I read the offending post, together with multiple users’ assurances that AA’s posts were basically all like that—I don’t want that in my garden.
I think there’s been enough time and enough posts that Nancy could have figured out that she misreported her reason and said so, if that was in fact the case.
I haven’t answered your objections to my style of moderation, but it isn’t because I haven’t been thinking about them. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can manage the sort of clear boundaries I think you prefer.
The good news is that I’m extremely unlikely to want to ban you. You have a civil approach, and part of what gets people banned is lowering the tone or if you prefer, being a pain in the ass.
The hard thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a good way to discuss the emotional effects of statements—the only way to evaluate emotional effects is by what people say those emotional effects are, and in addition to whether you trust what people say about their emotions, language is ambiguous that there are frequently alternate interpretations, especially when the underlying question is how much of a welcome people feel in a venue. It might be more efficient to say that claims about emotional effect are entangled with implied claims about who’s in charge and who matters.
The bad news is that I’m not at all sure I can formalize this, though my net gain in karma in this discussion suggests that I have an accurate sense of what LW is, even if it’s possible that LW could be improved with a more open attitude about abhorrent viewpoints. (I don’t think it would be an improvement, I’m just saying I acknowledge it’s theoretically possible.)
Just getting a clearer idea of what is abhorrent and what isn’t might help, but I really do think part of the problem is tone. There are policies which are vile no matter how abstractly and politely they’re expressed (for example, slavery on a grand scale), but the amount of hatred added to policy adds an emotional sting.
This. If I read the ban announcement legalistically, I disagree with it. But if I read the offending post, together with multiple users’ assurances that AA’s posts were basically all like that—I don’t want that in my garden.
I think there’s been enough time and enough posts that Nancy could have figured out that she misreported her reason and said so, if that was in fact the case.
I haven’t answered your objections to my style of moderation, but it isn’t because I haven’t been thinking about them. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can manage the sort of clear boundaries I think you prefer.
The good news is that I’m extremely unlikely to want to ban you. You have a civil approach, and part of what gets people banned is lowering the tone or if you prefer, being a pain in the ass.
The hard thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a good way to discuss the emotional effects of statements—the only way to evaluate emotional effects is by what people say those emotional effects are, and in addition to whether you trust what people say about their emotions, language is ambiguous that there are frequently alternate interpretations, especially when the underlying question is how much of a welcome people feel in a venue. It might be more efficient to say that claims about emotional effect are entangled with implied claims about who’s in charge and who matters.
The bad news is that I’m not at all sure I can formalize this, though my net gain in karma in this discussion suggests that I have an accurate sense of what LW is, even if it’s possible that LW could be improved with a more open attitude about abhorrent viewpoints. (I don’t think it would be an improvement, I’m just saying I acknowledge it’s theoretically possible.)
Just getting a clearer idea of what is abhorrent and what isn’t might help, but I really do think part of the problem is tone. There are policies which are vile no matter how abstractly and politely they’re expressed (for example, slavery on a grand scale), but the amount of hatred added to policy adds an emotional sting.
So basically what you’re saying is that your emotional unqualified to be a moderator.
BTW, you’re doing a remarkably good job of demonstrating advancedatheist’s claim that women can’t be trusted with positions of power.