I think this comes too close to saying I'm not responsible for the decisions I do make. I can't hide behind my little crossing guard sign.
My point is that you have made so few decisions, that any judgement that you are "too heavy-handed" would be automatically invalid based on a lack of available evidence. Had the criticism in question been broadly aimed at all the mods, then it might have had merit, but by targeting you explicitly it became outright silly.
You just devalue the person making the complaint. And worse, you measure members' value based on their formal debate activity.
That is a strawman which misses my point.
I'm not "devaluing" or "measuring" anyone.
But recall one of the major elements of my thesis; There is too much emphasis on the forums, too few people participate in formal debates, too many people participate exclusively in the forums, and the moderators are defending their moderating style based on what people say about them on the forums.
So the reason I'm highlighting the excessive forum participation vs. the debate participation ratio of all your examples is to demonstrate that it is almost entirely forum users who think the moderators are too "heavy-handed" (as you say), but people like myself who mainly emphasize debate participation (or have a more balanced approach) are frustrated by inconsistent, ineffective and heavily delayed moderator actions on the debates/comments/votes.
Essentially, to spell it out for you, I'm saying you have a flaw in your statistical analysis. You are claiming that a majority of users are voicing complaints about "heavy-handedness", when in reality your examples show that all such users making those complaints are forum-heavy with little or no debate-participation. You have excluded a large part of the user-base from your analysis to focus only on a vocal minority.
Informal debates take place in the forums.
That is an opinion, more so than a legitimate fact. And I've previously countered it with my own opinion; "Debating" on a forum is just a
flame war.
A "debate" that lacks any kind of structure, and allows any random person to suddenly jump in and interject their opinion (or merely disrupt conversation with an off-topic rant), isn't really much of a debate at all. And even to whatever extent you might think it to be a debate, you could just as easily go carry out such debates on ANY internet forum, social media or blogging site. This site offers nothing special at all of such is the case.
What you call the "formal" debates is literally the only feature of this site which sets it apart from any other. If we minimize that feature of the site, particularly to the extent of emphasizing the forum as equal or superior, then this site becomes nothing more than exactly what both myself and KingLaddy01 have accused it of being: An obscure refugee camp for DDO rejects.
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But you know, as a side note here, lets say we accepted your premise that activity on the forum can constitute an "informal" debate. If that were the case, then you and I would be debating right now.
And in that case, according to bsh1, any points that an opponent "drops" in a debate "automatically become true!"
And since you dropped most of what I said, most of what I said "automatically" becomes true, which in turn would be a pretty solid debate victory for me.
Lucky for you, I reject the nonsense idea that a dropped point is automatically true. But hopefully that gives you some perspective on how your argument might be "judged" if this were an actual debate.
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Bottom line though; Every time someone says the moderators aren't doing enough to maintain order on this site, we hear the canned response that the moderators can't do any more because "the community" rebels against "heavy-handed" moderation. However, this claim doesn't hold water, because there are an at least equal number of the opposite complaints, and even the few "heavy-handed" complaints that do exist are largely coming from people who never participate in debates anyway. Continuing to blame "the community" every time this issue comes up is not going to solve your problem.
