Can you find out if they’ll demod people if they aren’t activeor visible enough or something similar?
The problem is 50% the report queue and 50% overzealous moderators with no chill. As you no doubt know, "reporting" posts on NeoGAF consisted of PM'ing a moderator that you probably already had a functioning relationship with and saying "uh, _ is posting some pretty whack shit in the _ thread, can you go check it out? Relevant posts here and here." So it was bounded in two ways, firstly that the person seeking moderator assistance had to start an actual social interaction, and secondly that the moderator would go into the thread and presumably read it in a calm, linear way, judge the context, and then act appropriately. Then you guys would talk about it in the IRC channel and drop the banhammer through modbot or whatever. The UI for reporting on Resetera is totally different: for the poster with an issue it's really simple to do, so raising a ruckus about any particular post you disapprove of is as hassle free as downvoting on Reddit, and it's not obvious that
your username is attached to your report, so a lot of people think that they're doing so anonymously.
It's even worse on the moderator side. Moderators get a big red counter at the top of the screen that indicates how many reports are sitting unattended in the queue. You can't browse the site like a normal person and just turn your brain off because you've got this constant indicator that activates your inbox-zero instinct. Kind of like how Slack ruins the workplace and should be banned outright. Then you click on that queue and you see a report for a single post like "Go fuck yourself and die, asshole!" with a report message "really hostile behavior", and you'll think "uh, yeah, wow, that's pretty hostile". And you'll ban that person. My point being that viewing single posts at a time is the primary reason you'll see really inconsistent ban lengths and moderation in the same thread. It's because no one is moderating the thread from start to finish, they're just responding semi-appropriately to reports as they stream in.
Furthermore, even though reports stack for individual posts, reports for the same thread do not, so "controversial" threads will totally saturate the queue and overwhelms nervous types, and that's why you see the occasional mod message "STOP REPORTING POSTS IN THIS THREAD" which will seem utterly bizarre if you do not know this specific fact I just explained. You might think "well just decline reports, stupid," but if you decline a report for a post and then someone reports it again, that report is
reopened, which means the likelihood that another mod with less control over his emotions than you do is increasingly more likely to ban that person as reports accumulate, even though there was an initial determination and probably multiple of them that the post was fine and didn't need bold-red actioning. So you can see how the incentives here are all very fucked up along multiple dimensions and even well-intentioned people can get caught up in this and turn the community into a graveyard of ban messages.
