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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

An interesting procedural detail is how an admin decided to just close the discussion and ban the user before the mandatory discussion period was over, and got a lot of pushback for the sloppy decision making process. This was overturned, only for another admin to reach the same conclusion seven hours later, after the discussion was online for the mandatory 72 hours (with no consideration for the two hours between the wrongful decision and the reversal)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...

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Having a labyrinth of rules to follow and then applying them asymmetrically is a classic way to build power for the ingroup and exile outsiders.

The ingroup knows the rules well enough that they can wait until an enemy crosses one of the rules, then they have an excuse to punish them. The more rules on the books, the more opportunities to use them against your enemies.

When someone inside breaks the rules, it’s treated as a misstep, handled internally, and then forgiven after a short ceremony to make it look like order and procedure are still being maintained.

This.

At clubs. At school. At work.

This is one of the first things I taught my kids to recognize and yet I see plenty of people in their 40s or more that still haven't figured it out. Some of them even become "useful fools" and make matters worse.

Wikipedians refer to such ingroup members as The Unblockables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unblockables

You can build your own wikipedia.

Sanger did, indeed, create his own Wikipedia alternative.[0] It failed to catch on, and is currently maintaned and almost exclusively edited by just one person.

[0] https://www.citizendium.org/

>Having a labyrinth of rules to follow and then applying them asymmetrically is a classic way to build power for the ingroup and exile outsiders.

This is why Codes of Conducts became so popular.

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