I have to admit that ■■■■■■■ is right and I’ve moderated some users more harshly than I would moderate others based on their perceived reputations as bad actors.
I banned(or silenced, can’t remember) churchill for what I perceived to be antivax posting that in retrospect was a misread on my end but either way he lost the ability to post here for two weeks because of a bad decision on my part.
I banned jalfrezi for two weeks for “neverending trolling of other users” that I couldn’t remember the context or reasoning behind and had to dig through his posts from that time frame to figure out what triggered the ban, and it certainly wasn’t something that would get anyone else 2 weeks off.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this and I don’t want people to bring up reasons why these were actually good decisions because of events that happened in 2019 or something but there’s definitely a problem that some posters get singled out as “bad” and then anything they do that confirms that “bad poster” idea is held against them. Similarly there are “good” users who can be shitty to people or make snide references to other people’s pasts and nothing happens to them because of course they’re a “good poster” and even if that post was shitty they probably didn’t really mean it, or their other posting is so good we can ignore the occasional shitty post, etc. etc.
I (another sentence starting with I, quite the megalomania going on here) don’t think any of the mods intentionally behave in this biased manner and we try to do our best to remain fair and neutral but we’re humans and we fail miserably at it all the time.
Anyway, since I became a mod there was a vote that mods should serve 6 month terms, and I’ll have been a mod for 6 months on the 18th, so I’ll also step down then instead of sticking around longer.