Pope Opens Mouth; Inserts Foot

[Esquilax]

A group of individuals will reach consensus spanning their opinion. A democracy it isn't. Infallible it isn't either.

A group of individuals will reach consensus? Man, you must not pay a lot of attention to politics or religion, if you think that.

Sometimes staff have acted in isolation. Maybe not on your watch. Non staff aren't privy to the processes so can't know if they're being carried out fairly or not. I believe you try to be fair.

Some staff often express their dislike of certain members. We're expected to trust that those prejudices don't carry over into staff discussions.

Once again, this is one of those times that the things I know, behind the scenes, absolutely show your suspicions to be false, but I can't talk about that. Yes, we dislike certain members, but we're human beings, that happens. And yet those members are still here. They haven't been banned, they don't get warned an excessive amount, they don't even get reported that much. The majority of the reports we get, in fact, are about new members who are spamming or potentially socks. Anyone who's been here over a year generally doesn't feature in reports at all.

It's all well and good for you to stoke suspicions, but when the people who we routinely have disagreements here, for all to see, are some of the members who have been here the longest, it's pretty clear whether or not the users can trust us to keep our personal opinions on you guys out of our deliberations.

It's bad enough when rule enforcers act in full view. As your deliberations are private you must allow for question.

But the rules are enforced in full view. Every ban we make is logged for every one of you to see, every mod edit and thread change comes with a text alert stating what has been changed and a PM to the user in question telling them we've made a change... what else do you want? The only parts of our work that are obscured from view are the discussions we have before carrying out any action, and that's for a simple pragmatic reason, and it's the same one that cops have for not discussing arrest action right in front of the person they're going to arrest, or why juries are sequestered.

In my opinion, if you want to appear to be fair, you should answer criticism calmly and with reassurance. Anything else doesn't help anyone. You want to silence any criticism? How do you think that looks?

Who's trying to silence you? We're having a discussion about this in the open forum. Nobody has tried to censor you, we're just disagreeing with you. How do you even get the idea that we're trying to silence you when multiple times you've been asked for additional details about what you're claiming?

What kind of censorship begins and ends with the "censors" asking you to do more of the thing we're apparently trying to censor?