Why has this meta post been deleted? What is the reason for this censorship? Is it merely so that future visitors don't find out what has happened? Or was it accidental? Please undelete it.
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asked Sep 3, 2013 at 13:11
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5 Answers
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Firstly, the question shouldn't have been asked in the first place, there's no real point to discussing suspensions on meta in the way outlined by the post.
Such posts basically serve as a public shaming. It's a record that a user had done something bad; which we really don't need to have around. As mentioned here, it's best to discuss actions, not users; behaviors, not people.
So it was deleted.
In addition, there were some unnecessary edits made to one of the answers. Twice in the past week. They gave the impression that it still was an open issue. It isn't. There was no point whatsoever to bump the thread.
answered Sep 3, 2013 at 13:58
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There's too much banging of people's heads againts brick walls that we know won't budge around here. There are network-wide policies in place about suspensions which are there for a reason and we should not be asking for exceptional insider access for any particular one - any user of this site may well wind up thanking those policies, either from within a suspension or because of someone else's.
However, that isn't to say that there is a community that cares about Ron Maimon's presence. Yes, he was very often curt, to say the least. But he did some great physics. And many of us appreciate the physics he did on this site. The deleted question is a testament to that.
I just reached 10k rep today. I am offering a small testament to the great physics that Ron did here. It isn't much, but I've been bugged by the pure complaining for some time. Thanks for the great physics, Ron, and hopefully see you around here next year.
answered Sep 8, 2013 at 19:21
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I'd like to point two things out about the deleted discussion.
- It started nine months ago, and was closed 8 months ago.
- The OP of this question was not a member of SE when that discussion took place.
This discussion should probably end there. But since it hasn't, I will say that these discussions are never useful. That particular question was essentially an invitation for users to discuss how wonderful and useful a particular user was, and to object to his suspension solely on the basis of how wonderful and useful he was. Many users obliged. They argued essentially that that particular user should not have been suspended because of his reputation and value to he community. Never mind that the mods found him to be engaging in antisocial activity. The mods are not allowed to discuss the reason for that suspension, and they are the only people with that information. So it's really a one-sided discussion. Unless some other, non-privileged, user has some pertinent information, there really isn't any point to discussing the case. There was also another user suspended at the same time. No one complained about that suspension, which makes me think these arguments were either not in good faith, or were not fully thought through.
There is a line of thinking that there is something wrong with a particular suspension. That is a really odd way to think about it, though. The mods don't suspend users arbitrarily: they have to either see the bad behavior themselves, or it has to be reported to them by another user. We have 5 mods currently. I haven't seen one of them in some time, so maybe we only have 4 active mods. They all come to a consensus on suspensions. So if you think there is something wrong with a suspension, you're saying that they all screwed up. And that can happen, I suppose. If you think that happened, you can write to the SE Community team. I have seen at least three of them around. They out-rank our local mods. Ultimately, there are several levels of review that a suspension will go through. If you think all of those check don't work, or that all of those people are engaged in a conspiracy, then you think this system really doesn't work. Since you're still using the system, I don't believe that you really think these checks aren't working. This paragraph applies to everyone complaining about this particular suspension.
I will admit that, whenever I see a suspended account anywhere on SE, I will engage in a bit of rubbernecking. This usually consists of looking at the offending user's Activity page to see what they were writing before they were suspended. Sometimes I can guess, sometimes I can't; the mods usually scrub most of the offending material. In this particular case, it was really obvious. I believe that the mods are actually incapable of removing the evidence of the wrongdoing in this case.
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Should never have been. Too bad. I was reading usenet news stuff long before my children learned computers .... And I am old enough that they learned them from me. I was on BBS and I was a member of AOL when it was Compuserve. Never was this hard. We are only trading characters on mostly intellectual endeavor. Why do we need ban these fine folk or deny a few pages of text.. Certainly is getting pretty annoying ... I started a scientist but ended up a lawyer. You are free to do what you want with your site. But you will regret, I suspect, with these authoritarian approaches
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The answer to this question can be found in the answers to the following questions:
"Why has Ron Maimon recently been suspended for a year?";
"Why is there no academic freedom on Physics.SE"
