Reddit announces a "revamp" of quarantined subreddits, then quarantines multiple major subreddits

There are no rules without the discussion about those rules. The group won't follow any other authority. That's just how groups work. That's where the mandate comes from. When those rules are put into practice, having the past discussions that created them as a handy reference is a good way to educate the users and explain why action is being taken.

Holocaust denial is a bit of a special case, since we don't really need to have that discussion to decide to block the behavior. It's been had in askhistorians, and that link shared in this very thread, exactly like I said people would do with the wiki pages. This is normal forum behavior old as usenet. It'd be so much easier to do that and remember using wiki shortlinks, no?

Let's talk through this in excruciating detail and figure out where I'm losing you and cfabbro.

1. Someone posts something nasty. The topic itself is irrelevant to this process. Just that it's bad. How do we know it's bad? The group collectively decided it was bad when discussing it before and came up with rules against it - or it broke the law, or sitewide rules set by the admins.
2. Users notice, flag the comment/thread.
3. Mods notice, take action (removals, muting, whatever the situation calls for).
4. User shapes up, no problem.
5. User doesn't shape up, gets reported by mods to admins/next level and banned.
6. User creates a new account to continue his crap. Oops - can't post any new comments for x days/weeks (or, as now, has to get an invite). Guess he'll have to remember to come back here at that exact time to continue... and most won't. By then they'll be on to another forum where they can get away with their bad behaviors. The ones who are paid to shill are another story, but there are answers for that too.

Now, here's Bob coming into this hypothetical clusterfuck of a thread, which is probably locked by now (or will be shortly). He's new, never been here before. He doesn't know the rules. He's seeing mod actions for the first time, and they just censored a user - but look, there's a link. Ah, this user has a history of promoting $whatever-bs and here's another handly link on why that position is bullshit because it pops up from time to time. Looks like everyone in this group decided to block the behavior and here are their reasons. Now Bob knows why things happened this way, can read to learn about the issue, and has a handy reference to rebut that particular flavor of bullshit in the future.

Next rulebreaking thread on the same topic (five days later, from a completely different user) is locked in minutes with the same results and same link. This time, lots of users posted the link, because they remember it from last time - they beat the mods, who arrive shortly to deal with it by locking the thread. The discussion ended as fast as it began, and became a non-issue. That's as solved as the problem can get in an online forum.

The evidence and past discussion ends the debate about if the content is allowed or not. It then educates new users and gets them all on the same page about the group's goals/governance. It's all out in the open. Mods have now been given the mandate to shut that topic/rule violation down going forward.

This is all so simple and clear to me I feel like I've walked into a bizarro world where basic moderation is like quantum physics to some people. This is how communities have always self-moderated in the past since the time of BBS systems. All we're talking about here is formalizing the process and putting together systems to help facilitate it.

1. Problematic issue arises in a group (also known as Tuesday)
2. Group decides what to do about it in a heated conversation
3. Trusted users read all that and find the consensus approach
4. Rules get proposed/instated to deal with it
5. Resulting rule discussion gets cited every time there's a violation

If that 'discussion' about what rules and why never happens, I'm going to have a problem with it, and basically turn into goldfish on this topic. That's where my 'free speech' line is. Without that discussion it's random-power-user fiat, and that will end badly, like it always has, because those power users will have biases and make mistakes. The group has a shot at finding a better solution due to more perspectives being present.

So far Tildes has spent a rather terrifying amount of time discussing this stuff. All the systems and rules have been up for debate and refinement, and the few by-fiat rules here are simple common sense I think most anyone can get behind that were well-explained by Deimos in his announcement and docs pages. That's exactly how it should be. What I've described is how you scale it up to a hundred thousand plus communities, past the point where a single person has enough time/brainpower to keep up.

You are misunderstanding and misrepresenting @Amarok. They are basically saying that facts when invoked will lead free speech abusers into uncivil behaviour, allowing us to pick them up and put them out of the door quite easily, while not disallowing all discussion around sensitive topics.

I expect the mods of any given group will have the ability to mute users for a time period within those groups only. Giving mods banning capability is probably a bad idea - we've seen what happened on reddit. I wrote a bit about this before.

That said, if a user is constantly making a pain in the ass out of himself in certain groups, he's likely to get banned from the site, rather than just the group. When someone acts like an ass in the produce section, they get kicked out of the supermarket, not just the produce section. When people are asked to shape up, the ones who do won't have any problems. The ones who don't won't be here very long.