>Ostracism means to expell someone from a community or group.

Okay. But you didn't get ostracised (banned) you got blocked for a time (a bit more like 'time out').

> Historically, those ostracised were stigmatized by the action. . The ostracism was done without trial., the ostracised person was not granted any due-process or any opportunity to defend the accusations against them before they were ostrcised.

Okay. But you know that is 'historically' - right? I mean... You can email him. You can email him from your point of view. You can email him to try and bring him around to your point of view. You can email him to try and understand the rationale for his action. I have to say that I have found him to be particularly good with respect to explaining why. But thats my experience, I guess. And... It sounds like you have had a different one...

> I still want you to know that you did not do anything {bad}. If the reason was about a post that may have had issues about suicide or self-harm, then those type of posts could have been deleted.and an email sent to you that posts involving self-harm are not permitted to be posted.

To the best of my knowledge... The issue wasn't over people posting about suicidal or self harm ideation. The problem was (sorry to bring this back up but just so everyone is clear...). Well... There were three bits that were cited as reasons for the block. One of them was asking other people to kill oneself.

Yeah, I suppose you could delete them...

But then how is the person going to learn?
What is the incentive for the person to learn?
How many moderators do you need to run around editiing and deleting editing and deleting?

The rules are fairly clear on some things:
No joking about death
No asking other people to kill you
etc.

What you say about moderators is interesting...
That is more how things seem to work here.
And it seems to work fairly well over here too.
(In fact this site seems more in line with your suggested way of running things. More moderators, deletions / editings over blockings etc)

Dr Bob is attempting to move from a rule by one to a rule by a small group. From there... Rule by large group. Plato talks about this... The succession of types of ruler... Its funny that he talks about how to begin with there isn't really a need for rules... But then people start running riot and so there is a need for some rules. And so one person emerges as the leader and imposes some rules. Its funny that Plato thought this person must always be a tyrant. Though... I guess that is how some people do think of Dr Bob.

But my point was... That it is getting there with respect to having a small group of moderators. It is just that... Well... It is time consuming. I'm not sure how many volounteers he is getting. And... Change is slow. (Which is just as well from my pov because sometimes I do hate change).

Another point...

I agree that it would be preferable if the rules were all explicit. Explicit enough so that... It would be possible for a computer to follow an algorithm for applying them to particular situations. That way they would be completely objective and there wouldn't be any worries about treating some people unfairly etc.

But the fact is...

That most things do not work like that in the human brain...
Linguists try to derive the rules of grammer. The rules that people (and small children) follow when they understand that certain formulations are gramattical while others are not.

It is harder than one might suppose...
And yet generally... There is consensus on which expressions are gramatical and which are not.

Civility rules may be a little like that...
Not to suggest that the consensus is perfect...
But I have to say that I think I understand his rationale for most of the determinations. Not necessarily that I agree with all of them. But I do think I can see where he is coming from. And that is important to me. So it doesn't seem like a crazy-making environment.

I think the civility rules might be one of those things that cannot be fully made explicit.

Personally... I think you would have more luck with trying to train a PDP / connectionist network to take posts as inputs and deliver civility determinations. But then... You would have to use Dr Bob's determinations to see whether you are going to adjust the weightings or not...

If the performance of such a machine mapped pretty closely to the clear cut cases... Then we might be more inclined to trust it with respect to the tricky ones...

But of course such a process won't help make the civility rules explicit...

Though it would mean...
That part of his brain may be immortalised to make civility determinations long after he gets sick to death of us

mhah ha ha.