Dragon Rider (drag)

Ruthlessness is good, and responsible ruthlessness requires following through on your own intentions and the rules you created for yourself.

It’s like how Batman doesn’t kill. He decided that was the line and he sticks to it, even if it’s hard. Because he knows giving in would be worse.

Good. Moderators need limits on their powers. You should need to make the cage bigger in order to deal with the edge cases. And when you make the cage bigger, the community should have an opportunity to question that. That’s anarchy. That’s responsibility.

It’s better to have an unmoderated community full of trolls than a community with tyrant mods. That’s the same philosophy as “it’s better that a hundred guilty go free than one innocent is imprisoned”. Obviously a community with good mods is best, but if mods can’t follow their own rules, they shouldn’t follow no rules.

And responsible ruthlessness is only possible with robust rules.

“be nice” is a broad rule set. You need rule sets with clear expectations. If your rules are clear, then you won’t feel guilty for banning someone, and they don’t have a good excuse when they appeal. If you choose vague rules, people will submit perfectly good appeals which you have to turn down, and you’ll waste everyone’s time.

A ruleset is a machine. Video games are machines made out of rules, and so are board games. Board games just run on brains instead of microchips. A legal code is exactly the same, just more important. Make a good machine and moderation won’t even require your conscious mind. You can breeze through it according to the process without expending any mental energy.

Spend mental energy judging every situation individually, and you’ll either burn out or become a tyrant. Break your rules, and you either break your community or break yourself.

If people can get away with harming the community without breaking the rules, then just change the rules.

If you can’t think of any reasonable rules that would ban their behaviour, maybe they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s just that you personally don’t like it.