Forum posters, by and large, aren't public figures and shouldn't be subjected to personal scrutiny. Their views should be debated in isolation, because we should be discussing ideas and not each other. Otherwise you just get into mud flinging and dissections of hypocrisy, neither of which are informative or productive; it's just toxicity.
Sometimes someone is sort of a limited purpose public figure in that forum, and they cause problems across multiple threads with repetitive, disruptive behavior. In that case, the only way to challenge them on it is to call a spade a spade and to show the receipts. But it's a delicate criticism to make which readily devolves into mud flinging.
This is not violating the idea of looking at views in isolation. It's only violating the idea of looking at posts in isolation, which is a worse goal. We should want to look at someone's entire view on a specific topic.
You may not find that comment productive, and that's fine, but the reference to other posts about their view is not the problem with it.
Please note that I'm not saying you shouldn't read a comment history. I'm saying, you shouldn't weaponize a comment history.
If you examine the sibling thread to this one, I think you'll find that the commenter clarifies that they do, in fact, hold this person's views in contempt. Frankly when I skimmed the comment history in question I did find comments that made me go "yikes!", but that doesn't mean we engage in a no holds barred rhetorical cage match. As I've argued, that does harm to the conversation and community and fails to reach the people who should be reached.
I do see that.
But that doesn't mean the part before "bootlicker" was wrong!
> If you examine the sibling thread to this one, I think you'll find that the commenter clarifies that they do, in fact, hold this person's views in contempt.
Yes, the views. They're applying scrutiny to the specific views and not anything else about the person, which is the correct thing to do.
You can say they are doing the scrutiny wrong, but that's different from scrutinizing the wrong thing. They are scrutinizing the right thing. They're not bringing in irrelevant information to discredit. They're only bringing in information on the directly relevant views.
tl;dr "what to scrutinize" and "how to scrutinize" are different things. The way they did the former, "referencing views from another thread" but only on the same topic, was fine. The stuff like "bootlicker" is the latter.
Maybe just focus on the tl;dr?
You accused someone of bringing in outside information they should not have. I assert that, while they were very rude, the information they brought in was correct to bring in.
What am I missing?
I promise promise promise I am not deliberately misreading anything.
If we go back to the very start, you said "I don't think it's okay to call someone a bootlicker, or to reference their views from one thread in another". I'm not defending the bootlicker thing! I'm defending the referencing of views in this case, because and only because they are directly relevant.
You said two things were wrong, I think one of them is not wrong. That's not "picking and choosing" in any negative way.
I don't know why you ever thought I was defending the bootlicking accusation. But I didn't accuse you of misreading me on purpose.
Those banned are trolling him, plain and simple, and if you comment as though you can't see that, you deserve some judgement and scorn.
And...what's wrong with banning trolls? The nature of trolling isn't about "speech", it's about disruption of the platform that provides the chance for speech.
And who uses the term "bootlicker" who isn't juvenile or suffering unknown issues? "You are now about to witness the strength of redditor knowledge..." Awesome, but your comment is a pile of ashes on the ground.
If I stated commenting on HN as "dang_sucks", and I was banned for it, I'd call it an overreach.
You probably shouldn't throw stones about juvenile antics, seeing as you're inside that glass house.
> overreach
Do that in any forum on the internet, that is, troll using the Mod's name and profile picture, and see what happens. You might be lucky, but if you called your resulting ban an "overreach", it would be your error of judgement.
In this case, the Twitter user clearly was breaking shit on the way out, then celebrated her own antics on the new platform. "Act of protest"? It's generous of you to equate trolling with protesting.
Protesting is usually obvious what the protest is. What was hers about? The $8? Musk in general? It wasn't clear. It wasn't a protest.
I think her banning is a good thing for Twitter. Impersonate someone, bye bye. They want a trusted platform.
I have no skin in this at all. Not American, not a Twitter user, and I object to extreme left and right, but would like to see platforms like reddit and Twitter accommodate all sides. Rather than dwell in the echo chambers they gravitate towards. At least Musk is giving it a shot, if somewhat a messy shot. It's a messy world.
If you express yourself the way you just did, lurkers and people on the fence will read your comment. If you employ thought terminating cliches ("bootlicker") then they'll filter you out as noise.