Indeed. How is banning anyone going to provide a stronger signal than an announcement saying “this is a banworthy offence starting now”?
It seems to me that all we can possible accomplish here is throwing away possibly-constructive commenters.
It’s highly probably that anyone with enough karma to do any sort of damage with this is a high or medium-value user; downvotes have a cap based on one’s own karma total.
One could argue that this sort of behavior is antisocial and implies the perpetrator is probably not someone we want on the site. But that’s exactly the logic that leads to downvoting everything a person has posted!
As one of the people who was downvoted, I find it highly probably that whoever was responsible (in my case, and probably others) was acting in good faith. How could they have known to abide by a rule we are just now introducing?
Indeed. How is banning anyone going to provide a stronger signal than an announcement saying “this is a banworthy offence starting now”?
It seems to me that all we can possible accomplish here is throwing away possibly-constructive commenters.
It’s highly probably that anyone with enough karma to do any sort of damage with this is a high or medium-value user; downvotes have a cap based on one’s own karma total.
One could argue that this sort of behavior is antisocial and implies the perpetrator is probably not someone we want on the site. But that’s exactly the logic that leads to downvoting everything a person has posted!
As one of the people who was downvoted, I find it highly probably that whoever was responsible (in my case, and probably others) was acting in good faith. How could they have known to abide by a rule we are just now introducing?