To the shadowbanned user who replied to me: I looked at your comment history and found
- a comment about "Silicon Valleetards"
- a lot of non-killed comments, mostly (apparently) high quality
- one comment with what looks like casual racism, a handful of comments with extreme condescension towards other users, all killed
- a comment by 'dang saying part of his moderation activity includes personally looking at your comments and manually un-killing the vast majority of them
This seems entirely commendable on the moderators' part, and the only question it raises is how they have so much time. I have had the misfortune of being in multiple communities (a club in college, a job, a programming language, a church) where there was a skilled contributor who provided genuinely valuable and helpful work 80% of the time and hurtful behavior 20% of the time, and the community could never admit to itself that the harm they were causing to other skilled members was causing them to be net negative for the community.
"We will shadowban you and manually review and approve the 80% of your comments that build up the community" is a great approach if you can implement it, and I'm pleasantly surprised the mods think it's sustainable.
Also, in your specific case it seems more like 98% than 80%. I would really encourage you to take 'dang's advice in one of the threads where he responded, and 'sctb's advice in the thread where he banned you - agree to be civil. There's a difference between snark and insult. As someone who used to get a kick out of gratuitous public confrontation (as long as it was online and not in person!) and still needs to consciously suppress the occasional instinct to make technical disagreements personal (and doesn't always succeed), I totally get it. It feels super hypocritical for me to tell you not to do a thing that I do. But I hope this comes off as friendly advice from someone who's been there before, not hypocrisy. The comment that got you shadowbanned genuinely did not contribute to the community, and also genuinely is nowhere near your usual standards, so I'm surprised you're standing by it. (Two concrete suggestions: first, don't be afraid to type the comment you want to write and then close the tab, or submit it and then delete it 5 seconds later once you think better of it. I do that a lot. Second, if you're coming here to blow off steam, think hard about the thing in your life that's building up steam and whether you can get rid of it.)
I hope that, given that this is a thread about the merits of active moderation in online communities, a digression about active moderation in this online community is not too far off-topic.
