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Were there any others?

The similar timing of the bans and amount of time they'd been allowed to spam Poal without being banned makes me think there was a change in thinking about how Poal is going to operate.

I can't say I disagree with either ban (except that one is clearly going to keep making alts and coming back, so it's basically ineffective). But I also can't really put my finger on why I agree with either ban. They're annoying niggers, but @PuttIt0ut was pretty much just posting in his designated subs (unless @AOU was moving them) and @the_old_ones for now seemed content to try to boost his points and restore/clean his reputation and remove the account tag, by posting anti-pedo (hmm) news and only occasionally autistically threatening people in comment sections.

So bring us in on it, admins. What is on your minds?

Were there any others? The similar timing of the bans and amount of time they'd been allowed to spam Poal without being banned makes me think there was a change in thinking about how Poal is going to operate. I can't say I disagree with either ban (except that one is clearly going to keep making alts and coming back, so it's basically ineffective). But I also can't really put my finger on why I agree with either ban. They're annoying niggers, but @PuttIt0ut was pretty much just posting in his designated subs (unless @AOU was moving them) and @the_old_ones for now seemed content to try to boost his points and restore/clean his reputation and remove the account tag, by posting anti-pedo (hmm) news and only occasionally autistically threatening people in comment sections. So bring us in on it, admins. What is on your minds?

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[–] • 9 pts

I knew this would be the next question in said train of thought. My response to that is to do a proverbial cost-benefit analysis (infogalactic.com). Is a user's behaviour a net-positive, negative, or neutral. Would banning them be a net-positive, negative, or neutral. "Negative" behaviour, overall, is of little importance— it's the causes of their effects that you need to look at. Is someone's "negative" behaviour driving traffic and enabling lively discussion? Cool. Is someone's negative behaviour shitting up the front page, disrupting everyone's experience and generally pissing all the other users off? Off with his head!

We're all human, and nothing is perfect. 100% of the users won't be on-board with every decision, and every action will piss someone off. Any solution we can conceivably come up with will never be totally just and ideal, because of this. Ignoring an obvious problem, however, is not a solution.

[–] • 6 pts

Cool. Thank you for the well thought out response.

Initially the potential problem I see with this is that it's completely arbitrary. The 'damage done' and 'good it brings' scales are totally subjective, and would probably even vary day-to-day depending on the decision-makers' moods. I think there is also the potential that over the long term the goalposts could shift, to the point where just generally being a prick is 'doing more harm than good' in the decisoon-maker's eyes.

That said, it seems judgement calls have to be made. And by extension, poor judgement calls have to be tolerated to some extent by the userbase. I believe this has already happened, as the admins are not perfect.

This is an incomplete answer to your proposition. I'll have to think it over a bit more.

[–] • 5 pts

Algorithms should be used to make all decisions pertaining to user restrictions, just like how they assign the 'suspicious behaviour' tag. If you push the suspicious behaviour hard enough the algorithm throws you in s/jail. Algorithms have no moods and can't do anything arbitrarily.