The thing is, I can handle going 1 against 20 in an argument without too much trouble. I could handle posting there and getting dog-piled if it weren't for the mods punctuating every dog-pile with a ban. The staff there just completely kills all motivation to even try and correct misconceptions, because you can't rebuff people's poor points--or acknowledge the good ones--if you're banned.
The paradox of moving forward the line of what is "bannable", to the point of where just the idea of disagreement being a bannable offense, is that it doesn't make community feel safer. It instead feeds into the community's culture of victimhood, their paranoia, and their entitlement. "Yes, people who simply disagree with you should be banned" isn't a good message to be putting into people's heads. And it's on of the factors resulting in literally every demographic that I can conceive on the forum of feeling like they're under attack. People in the BCT thread tell one another to head their heads low in the OT, Poligaf in their paranoia talk about incognito trump spies infiltrating the forum with their ideas of "free speech", women feel that it's too misogynistic, the LGBTQ posters feel that it's too bigoted, folks in the industry feel that it's too much of a threat to post there, the leftists feel like the site is ran by neoliberals who will inevitably silence them, and the neoliberals wonder why the hell the radical leftist administration haven't permed them yet, and you have the figures who have gotten many people banned never feel at ease but instead feel like they're ever further entrenched in a war against the "others".
There isn't a utopian state at the end of this. It's a cycle of perpetual panic attacks that will only dwindle as the community dwindles, trapped in their skull-sized hells, until either the community can no longer sustain itself or the administration realizes the cycle and corrects itself, which if done too late leads to fracturing, and they're left with a tiny dying community because everybody knows the reputation that they're authoritarian extremists and that extreme authoritarian side will forever think the administrationship turned traitor.
