I think it's more dangerous to allow them to stick around because of a misguided sense of charity.
> What would this person have to do to remove a negative label you've associated with them?
First, let's stop right here. You're using weasely language to try to make it sound like noticing someone has said bigoted things, and kicking them from the community for it, is some kind of mistake, as if the bigotry was the fault of the moderator, rather than the bigot.
Place blame where it belongs: if someone says something sexist, someone noticing that they appear to be sexist is fully the responsibility of the person who said the sexist things.
Let's reword what you said in a way that makes sense:
> What would the bigoted poster have to do to convince you they're no longer a bigot? (at least as far as internet posting goes)
There, much better.
Depends on what they said, of course. If they said something racist, I would expect an earnest acknowledgement of that, that racism is bad, etc. As well as evidence from posting elsewhere on Reddit that they've reformed.
> You're using weasely language to try to make it sound like noticing someone has said bigoted things, and kicking them from the community for it, is some kind of mistake, as if the bigotry was the fault of the moderator, rather than the bigot.
And you're trying to deflect from the problems by once again reducing a person's behaviour to simple labels that justify any actions to stop "bad people". Every mod has certainly banned people who are not bad actors, as but one example. Maybe the mod had a bad day, maybe the poster had a bad day.
> Place blame where it belongs: if someone says something sexist, someone noticing that they appear to be sexist is fully the responsibility of the person who said the sexist things.
The use of blame is not the problem, the problems are the standards used to assign blame, the processes by which correctness of blame assignment is judged, the consequences to the accused should blame be found justified, the path to redemption for the accused, and the transparency of the whole process to the accused and the community so that everyone can see that justice is being done and mod power is not being abused.
You know, the sort of thinking that took millennia to evolve into our modern legal systems. Show me a modern nation where exile is a legitimate outcome for a legal infraction. As flawed as modern justice is, at least we've evolved past the tribal thinking inherent to punishments like exile.
If this laundry list may seem impossible to satisfy given current sites, maybe it is. Maybe that also shouldn't be an excuse to not do it. I've written about this briefly before with some ideas why the problem exists, and how some of the issues might be mitigated [1,2].
> What would the bigoted poster have to do to convince you they're no longer a bigot? (at least as far as internet posting goes)
I'm sure that rephrasing is much more comforting to you. In reality, the situation is:
> What would a poster whose comment I and a few others have interpreted to be bigoted have to do to convince you they're not a bigot?
Regardless of the fact that no amount of circumstantial evidence would amount to proof, you've basically just doubled down on your assertion that people you consider bigots don't belong in your community, even if they're polite. That's exactly the problem.
> Depends on what they said, of course. If they said something racist, I would expect an earnest acknowledgement of that, that racism is bad, etc. As well as evidence from posting elsewhere on Reddit that they've reformed.
Few if any mods are going to do such detective work (due to time, patience, whatever), nor would many even entertain a conversation with a person that was banned for such reasons.
And as the set of mods changes over time, and the interpretation of policies changes over time, and with no transparency of community checking of mod power, they end up banning people for ever more specific infractions, with no real appeals process, thus creating the perfect echo chambers.
Every mod and mod system starts out with good intentions, but particularly with communities covering divisive issues, this is where naive moderation inevitably ends up. I don't think examples of unjust moderation are in short supply.
> And you're trying to deflect from the problems by once again reducing a person's behaviour to simple labels that justify any actions to stop "bad people".
The surface area someone has with a random internet message board is usually very limited. They post shit, and thus others there think of them as shitty. Pretty simple.
That they have some deeper inner life is irrelevant in the context. We're not their parents. We're not their therapist. We're not their social worker. If they can't behave themselves, then they shouldn't be allowed to ruin the space for others who can behave.
> so that everyone can see that justice is being done and mod power is not being abused.
Please, we're talking about volunteers on internet message boards here, not judges passing judgment over someone's right to basic freedom. The only power I have is to stop someone from posting in a subreddit -- and even that's not really accurate, since creating a new account is fairly trivial.
I can make further posting in a particular subreddit less convenient for them. That's it.
> What would a poster whose comment I and a few others have interpreted to be bigoted have to do to convince you they're not a bigot?
All labels, all words are subjective somewhere, somehow. To belabor this point is mere pedantry. Of course our judgments and rules are subjective, that's true for all judgments and all rules throughout all history, so why bring it up?
> Few if any mods are going to do such detective work (due to time, patience, whatever), nor would many even entertain a conversation with a person that was banned for such reasons.
It's never come up for people banned for bigotry; they're usually unceasingly hostile. We have unbanned a few people who were more general assholes (e.g. flaming) and came back later, based on exactly what I suggested. They apologized for being aggressive and insulting previously, we checked their post history, they seemed to be productive posters, so we unbanned them.
This doesn't involve very much work, actually, partially because it doesn't come up very often, and partially because skimming through someone's post history to see whether they're generally earnest/helpful doesn't take very long.
> And as the set of mods changes over time, and the interpretation of policies changes over time, and with no transparency of community checking of mod power, they end up banning people for ever more specific infractions, with no real appeals process, thus creating the perfect echo chambers.
> Every mod and mod system starts out with good intentions, but particularly with communities covering divisive issues, this is where naive moderation inevitably ends up. I don't think examples of unjust moderation are in short supply.
I agree that issues of mod transparency and power abuse are an issue. Certainly you can find plenty examples of terrible mods around.
Nevertheless, we're almost invariably talking about volunteers here. Holding them to a standard comparable to real life legal procedures is ridiculous. Ain't nobody got time for that.
For at least more popular subs, which applies to one of the ones I mod, I've come to the conclusion that truly fixing the situation is essentially infeasible. The total amount of content and activity outstrips what a volunteer team can handle in a good, consistent way; the best you can aim for is "passable, most of the time", imo. (And just increasing the number of moderators linearly causes too many coordination problems)
Sounds like you are high on power, forcing your own subjective morals on others, thinking you can change their morals and the way they think just like that with silly threats of bans. This is not how people work. They can't get much out of it, except form their own opinion of you, the moderator. You think of them as sexist assholes, they will think of you as an SJW asshole.
All morals are subjective. I'm not going to let bigots run rampant in a space that I have responsibility for just because some people feel like it's their sovereign right to be an asshole anywhere they please.
> What would this person have to do to remove a negative label you've associated with them?
First, let's stop right here. You're using weasely language to try to make it sound like noticing someone has said bigoted things, and kicking them from the community for it, is some kind of mistake, as if the bigotry was the fault of the moderator, rather than the bigot.
Place blame where it belongs: if someone says something sexist, someone noticing that they appear to be sexist is fully the responsibility of the person who said the sexist things.
Let's reword what you said in a way that makes sense:
> What would the bigoted poster have to do to convince you they're no longer a bigot? (at least as far as internet posting goes)
There, much better.
Depends on what they said, of course. If they said something racist, I would expect an earnest acknowledgement of that, that racism is bad, etc. As well as evidence from posting elsewhere on Reddit that they've reformed.