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The best idea imho is the assumption that people have some intelligence. I know, it's an utopia. But, well... Give them a way to block users. Help law enforcement when something actually criminal happens. For the rest, just let it happen, and let the people deal with it. As in real life. There is no other chance. Making the masses even more stupid than they are today (by hiding reality from them) is not the way to go. It never was. Let people interact with each other on their own. There cannot be a higher instance which 'manages' that in some way. Censorship isn't better when you call it 'moderation'. And don't declare everything as a harassment or worse. It's just a facet of communication to also communicate unfortunate things. People are veeeery sensitive plants since some time.

And again, for actual crime, it's not the forum moderators at all who should lead some actions. That would really be problematic.

> Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently.

Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.

Three-strikes-style rules like this make for easy decision-making, but they don’t make for good decision-making. They eliminate curiosity about the root problem, reject the reality of how humans learn (it is almost never linear), and usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point. Compliance by fear does not make for open and healthy communities.

The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.

> They eliminate curiosity about the root problem

Sure but they also give consistency, avoid the sheen of "you can behave badly if you do it infrequently", and avoid the kind of loophole lawyering you often get when rules aren't consistently and stringently applied.

> usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point.

Having been in many forums where bad behaviour[0] was not rooted out at source immediately and forcefully, I can say from my experience that also ends up badly. Perhaps not for the people in charge and their favoured brethren, I'll grant you.

[0] Including my own on occasion, I am ashamed to say with hindsight.

Why so much emphasis on rules? If someone is clearly doing something wrong, you don't need a rule violation. If someone is not clearly doing something wrong, then don't ban them. This way, there is no possibility for rules lawyering.

The goal of an online community is to be a space where people interact, so banning someone from interacting is a failure to succeed at the goal, but so is allowing someone to remain to the point where others choose to leave voluntarily.

The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.

You give them warnings, time-limited bans, etc. I wasn't trying to say it has to be binary, I was saying the rules are given too much emphasis by some people when they really don't matter at all.

E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.

> I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it.

You find a new moderator who won't stand for it. They start escalating moderation action, and the wider moderation team follows their example

If you're at the point where your community is so toxic that you can't find a moderator... you need a ban wave. Good luck

... or you just finally realize that interaction beyond your own bubble is more complicated, harder, and more tiring, but not toxic. People are very very sensitive plants nowadays. It doesn't help. Don't try to hide people even more from reality. You did that for long enough, obviously. Don't make them even more stupid by declaring everything as toxic harassment which challenges their simple, tiktok-driven minds. We already have enough of those zombies around, who in a few decades are planned to acquire my pension.

Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to other online spaces like Twitter and Reddit where the discourse today is so toxic that it has desensitised people into accepting or even encouraging abusive behaviour. Name-calling is a typical example. It’s something that should register as abusive but doesn’t for most people any more, because in these very high-profile online spaces it’s not just normative, it’s actively rewarded with likes and upvotes. It’s probably impossible to not have that seep into most people’s baseline expectations for online conduct.

An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.