...as a small case study, the Effective Altruism forum has been impoverished over the last few years by not being lenient with valuable contributors when they had a bad day.
In a few cases, I later learnt that some longstanding user had a mental health breakdown/psychotic break/bipolar something or other. To some extent this is an arbitrary category, and you can interpret going outside normality through the lens of mental health, or through the lens of “this person chose to behave inappropriately”. Still, my sense is that leniency would have been a better move when people go off the rails.
In particular, the best move seems to me a combination of:
In the short term, when a valued member is behaving uncharacteristically badly, stop them from posting
Followup a week or a few weeks later to see how the person is doing
Two factors here are:
There is going to be some overlap in that people with propensity for some mental health disorders might be more creative, better able to see things from weird angles, better able to make conceptual connections.
In a longstanding online community, people grow to care about others. If a friend goes of the rails, there is the question of how to stop them from causing harm to others, but there is also the question of how to help them be ok, and the second one can just dominate sometimes.
I don’t think not banning users for first offences is necessary the highest bar I want to reach for. For instance, consider this comment. Like, to exaggerate this a bit, imagine receiving that comment in one of the top 3 worst moments of your life.
I value a forum where people are not rude to each other, so I think it is good that moderators give out a warning to people who are becoming increasingly rude in a short time.
Prompted by a different forum:
I’m surprised by this. I don’t feel like the Forum bans people for a long time for first offences?
I don’t think not banning users for first offences is necessary the highest bar I want to reach for. For instance, consider this comment. Like, to exaggerate this a bit, imagine receiving that comment in one of the top 3 worst moments of your life.
I value a forum where people are not rude to each other, so I think it is good that moderators give out a warning to people who are becoming increasingly rude in a short time.
A factor here is that EA has historically had a mental health problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FheKNFgPqEsN8Nxuv/ea-mental-health-survey-results-and-analysis?commentId=hJweNWsmJr8Jtki86).