Why?
To be fair, he didn’t call the poster distasteful; if read carefully, he’s clearly describing the poster’s view of humanity as distasteful. That’s a world of difference in my eyes.
Why would we prohibit people from engaging in a campaign to persuade other posters to not engage with a particular poster? Is that your question? If it is, then the answer is because:
It is personalization and not actual argument
It is destructive to discussion
It is typically a distracting hijack
It can be junior modding
Well I didn’t mean to get so involved in this thread, but a few of these comments from mods on what you all think are the best ways to preserve quality debate just have me scratching my head. I’ve said my piece on the “you don’t know what you’re talking about” issue, but now this “just ignore that guy” issue has me thinking.
So there’s a particular poster I have in mind who really provides nothing of substance to debates. If someone provides a list of 23 reasons why apples are great, this poster responds with never more than two lines with something like, “Oh, apples are green? Are you sure about that?” Nothing about these responses is really constructive, like maybe, “You focused on green apples, but there’s lots of other colors too” or whatever.
Every. Single. Post. is just a cherry-picking of one particular issue turned into a question to insinuate the other poster is wrong, or to start a wild goose chase to JAQ off on a microscopic, insignificant point. Sometimes this starts a minor derailment of a thread – not a trainwreck, but there’s never any benefit to it.
So this poster has surely had a few mod notes, maybe a warning or two, but really – there’s like zero chance this poster is going change his ways, and maybe like a 3% chance that mods would ban the poster sometime in the next five years.
It would seem to me that it would be perfectly fair for people to treat this poster like a weird dude you see on the subway every morning: “Yeah, he’s annoying, but not hurting anyone – just leave him alone and go about your business and everything will be fine.”
So I’m getting the impression that if everyone just spontaneously does this, mods have no problem. But if someone actually posts this advice, in hopes of avoiding the very common and totally pointless derailment I mentioned, it is frowned upon?
What I’m taking away from this is that it’s fine to be a contentless poster who serially derails threads on pointless minutiae, but the behavior by itself will very likely never get the poster banned so we are left with a gadfly; but in the name of preserving quality debate on the board, nobody can ever actually say that the person is a gadfly? This is just so odd to me.
And mods – please know I’m not trying to be all on your case about this. I think this thread is maybe like the second time I’ve questioned mod decisions/guidance ever. I’m just reading some of the comments here and thinking, “Wait, how does this make sense?”
For what it’s worth, and I realize that may not be very much, but I almost never accept any argument that relies on junior modding as I find the whole concept patronizing. I can read who has and doesn’t have a moderator title.
Letting dum dums who don’t know what they’re talking about blather on is also destructive to discussion and a distracting hijack. And, for what it’s worth, something that makes me far less likely to return to a thread, whether participating or simply reading, than another poster suggesting someone should zip it. The latter I can zip by and agree or disagree with according to my own evaluation. The former makes a hash of the thread.
It is personalization and not actual argument, that’s fair. But again, I find the attack the post and not the poster patronizing. I guess I dunno about everyone else, but I’m not just an unthinking channel from the universe for my posts. I have the capacity to intuit that someone calling my post dumb is really saying something about me, not the posts. I think that if the SDMB really wanted to be the place you seem to say it is, attacking should be entirely verboten regardless of whether it’s directed at post or poster. Which would have the added benefit of reducing confusion since there’s no need to adjudge whether someone personalized the insult or not.
One of the things I’m rarely wanting to do is rule on someone’s worthiness to participate in a thread. I’ve done it, from time to time, and once outlawed an argument (the ‘marry my dishwasher’ bit from a SSM thread), when they got distracting but that’s really a variation on trolling.
But ruling that ‘poster X is too dumb/ignorant/whatever’ to participate? That would fall under the ‘careful what you wish for’ because once moderation starts down that path where does it end? How do we realistically and fairly judge who does and does not get to participate in a debate? I see no way to fairly adjudicate that.
In terms of complaining about posters one thinks are not up to snuff - for whatever reason - there is always the BBQ Pit to make open complaints about others. But telling others to disregard another poster in Great Debates or Elections? That’s never going to be best practices.
I’ll just say first that I’m sympathetic to what you are expressing in the whole of your post, but I snipped parts of the post to address them specifically.
First, yes, if everyone treats it as the harmless dude that isn’t hurting anyone, that would be fine. If there is a concerted effort to convince people to not respond to an individual poster, that would probably draw attention. It does seem strange, but the way I see it is that while a specific instance that is clear cut it seems strange to restrict individual posters from saying to ignore someone, in the larger context of things, it can lead to a place where there is widespread efforts to shun individual posters. One instance may be okay, but I don’t think pervasive campaigns to shun other posters is conducive to discussion. There have been times where people have done this themselves I think in an appropriate way, and also in an inappropriate way. **LHoD **has in my recent memory done this well, and I’ve noted other posters like **BPC **when I think they’ve crossed the line.
When I look at it, I ask if we would be okay if the behavior is repeated by many posters, all the time throughout many threads. I don’t think so and the way to address it is to not allow this type of shunning to take hold. This isn’t to say that such derailing behavior is acceptable. I think the appropriate way to address it is to report it and let mods step in.
I’m not opposed to putting the kibosh on JAQing off, and quickly curtailing pointless focus on minutiae so if those things are reported, then we can take a look. There have been multiple times where I’ve interceded for JAQing, and put on guide rails to avoid getting hung up on minutiae. Both of these things present challenges for moderation though. If a person asks questions and people respond, that looks a lot like actual discussion even if it may not be the highest caliber. If a person points out some minutiae and people respond, that can be organic flow of a discussion even if it may not be very interesting or relevant. If a person does this repeatedly and no one responds, I’m much more likely to intercede than if the conversation is naturally flowing that way. It seems counter intuitive so I’m not sure if that’s the best approach, but that’s how I’ve thought about it thus far.
Oh boy – in a thread about the importance of good debate, we see an unadulterated slippery slope fallacy trotted out in this way? Shame, shame!
With that lighthearted comment, I don’t have anything more to add on these topics.
More than once, I’ve fallen on my acious when a slope was too steep and slippery. 
I think CarnalK is rude, but rude shouldn’t be a step toward a suspension and a banning, which is what a mod warning is.
As someone said, a “knock it off” was in order, but warnings are formal infractions. Not necessary.
I’m not attacking Bone, either. He’s a good mod. I just disagreed with the warning.
Jonathan Chance gave me the warning, as his wont.
Regularly rude in GD or GQ most certainly *should *be. And I say this as someone who’s gone over that line a few times.
Don’t remember ever being rude in GQ. That’s an odd pair of forums to use as an example since discussions are definitely allowed to run hotter in GD than GQ.
They’re the more factual and debate-orientated forums, as opposed to the opinion-based ones, and generally modded that way, IME.