I absolutely didn’t trust Scott to garden his own space on SSC (and correctly so, in retrospect, as his pattern of bans was quite obviously jam-packed with political bias). I don’t read ACX comments much, but I don’t expect that anything’s changed since the SSC days, in this regard. (And this is despite the fact that I both respect Scott as a writer and thinker, and like him as a person.)
I don’t even trust myself to moderate a forum that I run (where, despite being the sole administrator of the site, I am not only formally excluded from having moderation privileges, but I don’t even pick the moderators).[1]
Giving authors the ability to ban people they don’t want commenting is so common that it feels like a Chesterton’s Fence to me.
It’s not a Chesterton’s fence at all, because (a) it’s very new (it wasn’t like this before the blog era!), and (b) we know perfectly well why it came about (hint: the answer is “politics”).
Now, why do you think I set things up like that? Specifically, what do I personally gain from this setup (i.e., setting aside answers like “I have a principled belief that this is the correct way to run a forum”)?
I absolutely didn’t trust Scott to garden his own space on SSC (and correctly so, in retrospect, as his pattern of bans was quite obviously jam-packed with political bias). I don’t read ACX comments much, but I don’t expect that anything’s changed since the SSC days, in this regard. (And this is despite the fact that I both respect Scott as a writer and thinker, and like him as a person.)
I don’t even trust myself to moderate a forum that I run (where, despite being the sole administrator of the site, I am not only formally excluded from having moderation privileges, but I don’t even pick the moderators).[1]
It’s not a Chesterton’s fence at all, because (a) it’s very new (it wasn’t like this before the blog era!), and (b) we know perfectly well why it came about (hint: the answer is “politics”).
Now, why do you think I set things up like that? Specifically, what do I personally gain from this setup (i.e., setting aside answers like “I have a principled belief that this is the correct way to run a forum”)?