The closing sentence of this comment, “All in all, bad ideas, advocated by the intellectually weak, appealing mostly to the genetically subpar,” breaks our Forum norm against unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness.
The “genetically subpar” part is especially problematic. At best, it would appear that the commenter, John, is claiming that the post mainly appeals to the less intelligent—an unnecessarily rude and most likely false claim. A worse interpretation is that John is making a racist remark, which we view as strongly unacceptable.
Overall, we see th...
The moderators have removed personal information from the above comment. The Forum's policy is to allow anonymity, and even if you believe someone has misbehaved or misled, it is still not allowed to identify them or related parties.
We’re issuing SuperDuperForecasting a one-month ban for breaking strong Forum norms in several comments (1,2). Specifically:
To be clear, I’m not commenting on the more complex questions discussed elsewhere in the thread, such as whether or when it’s appropriate to speculate about someone’s psychology. But I do want to flag that mental illness is often stigmatised and we should probably ...
I think this kind of discussion is important, and I don't want to discourage it, but I do think these discussions are more productive when they're had in a calm manner. I appreciate this can be difficult with emotive topics, but it can be hard to change somebody's mind if they could interpret your tone as attacking them.
In summary: I think it would be more productive if the discussion could be less hostile going forwards.
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Some examples:
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming incr...
Hey folks, a reminder to please be thoughtful as you comment.
The previous Nonlinear thread received almost 500 comments; many of these were productive, but there were also some more heated exchanges. Following Forum norms—in a nutshell: be kind, stay on topic, be honest—is probably even more important than usual in charged situations like these.
Discussion here could end up warped towards aggression and confusion for a few reasons, even if commenters are generally well intentioned:
The moderation team is banning KnightSaladin for 2 months for violating Forum norms. (You can appeal here.)
KnightSaladin’s comments on the Forum have been aggressive (using rhetorical attacks), overconfident, and uncivil — generally not aimed towards collaborative truth-seeking. Examples of things that I want to heavily discourage from the Forum:
pinkfrog (and their associated account) has been banned for 1 month, because they voted multiple times on the same content (with two accounts), including upvoting pinkfrog's comments with their other account. To be a bit more specific, this happened on one day, and there were 12 cases of double-voting in total (which we’ll remove). This is against our Forum norms on voting and using multiple accounts.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake...
Moderation update: We're issuing dstudiocode a one-month ban for breaking Forum norms in their recent post and subsequent behavior. Specifically:
The post in question, which asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered "ethical," crosses a line in terms of promoting potential violence.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not just the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they ... (read more)