> Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.

As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.

Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.

Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.

> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).

Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.

And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.

> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.

Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?

> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.

Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.

Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.

Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?