Technical detail: Hard bans do exist here, but they are relatively rare. What happens usually is that the existing members vote on the quality of your posts and comments, and if you keep accumulating negative score, at some levels various penalties will start to apply, such as limiting the number of comments you can post per day, etc. Getting sufficiently deep will effectively result in a ban; my point is that this doesn’t happen suddenly, but gradually.
If my values contradict with the community, then we’re simply incompatible.
Yeah, different places have different rules. Even “there are no rules” is a possible choice, and there may be places out there that approach this ideal, although I would expect that those which get too close to it end up full of spam (because “don’t post spam” is also a rule).
The dynamics essentially works like this: You want to communicate with other people. (If you don’t, you might as well install a web forum on your own computer, and you get 100% free speech and 0% rules, but also no audience.) But the other people are free to leave, if they get annoyed. And although the relation is not perfect, the people who produce better content often put stricter limits on how annoying is too annoying for them… simply because they have many less annoying alternatives available, such as publishing on their own Substack. Yes, those authors want an audience too, but they can easily get it anywhere else; if they produce sufficiently good content, the audience will follow them.
The community is what it is in part of because of the rules it has. If it had different rules, it would have different members (because some of the original ones would leave, and maybe start a new community somewhere else). It is a mistake to imagine the same community, only with different rules—that would only work for a short time.
Technical detail: Hard bans do exist here, but they are relatively rare. What happens usually is that the existing members vote on the quality of your posts and comments, and if you keep accumulating negative score, at some levels various penalties will start to apply, such as limiting the number of comments you can post per day, etc. Getting sufficiently deep will effectively result in a ban; my point is that this doesn’t happen suddenly, but gradually.
Yeah, different places have different rules. Even “there are no rules” is a possible choice, and there may be places out there that approach this ideal, although I would expect that those which get too close to it end up full of spam (because “don’t post spam” is also a rule).
The dynamics essentially works like this: You want to communicate with other people. (If you don’t, you might as well install a web forum on your own computer, and you get 100% free speech and 0% rules, but also no audience.) But the other people are free to leave, if they get annoyed. And although the relation is not perfect, the people who produce better content often put stricter limits on how annoying is too annoying for them… simply because they have many less annoying alternatives available, such as publishing on their own Substack. Yes, those authors want an audience too, but they can easily get it anywhere else; if they produce sufficiently good content, the audience will follow them.
The community is what it is in part of because of the rules it has. If it had different rules, it would have different members (because some of the original ones would leave, and maybe start a new community somewhere else). It is a mistake to imagine the same community, only with different rules—that would only work for a short time.