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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

> benevolent dictatorship

Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I guess not telling users also prevents future issues, in a way.

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In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to the community and moderators.

Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.

Well, you sorta posted this on a submission about a paper that indicates the opposite; telling people why something was removed leads to less content being removed and other issues, so I think that might be more of a perceptual bias rather than reality.

Good point. :)

Then you've encountered much nicer mods than I have. My initial questions into my banning were more often than not met by a boorish mod hurling insults, even though I always kept it civil. There's plenty of subreddits putting this type of bad mod behavior on display, so I know I wasn't the only one. In fact, bad mods were so prevalent when I left, it was a daily running joke in a lot of communities.

Write a bot that has the max power, run it on a cloud server, let it change its own password and have its own paypal account so no one can turn it off, just requires donations to keep running.

Let it run on a set of rules, and count votes to change rules. Now you have DemocracyBot

You have sort of reinvented Nomic. I've not seen it applied to moderation before, but it'd definitely be interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Bitcoin, would be easy to get a paypal account shut down.

Makes me chuckle. Democrats most times are against "at-will" situations, except when it benefits them.

(Just like every other group: self-serving.)

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