This bums me out.
I’m guessing he was a sock and not a troll because all of his posts I read were well behaved. I’d like to see the SDMB adopt a less-permanent form of punishment with a chance to eventually return.
You should have read more of his posts, then.
Being banned isn’t necessarily permanent as it is, given that bannees can request reinstatement. Case in point: @lissener.
The poster in question was relentlessly argumentative about any tiny side point they could bring up to avoid the fact that most of their assertions and arguments had been successfully challenged and rebutted. It was painful to read any thread they were in, and I don’t know how so many other posters were able to persist as long as they did.
They may not have called names or broken any of the other bright-line rules (or they may have, I didn’t read everything they wrote) but to me they were clearly in it for the lulz.
Deeply ironic statement considering that the bannee was a sock, likely on his dozeneth incarnation here. [I can hazard a few educated guesses as to who they were, too]
Not necessarily ragging on Skywatcher here, understand, but clearly the Whack-A-Mole method of dealing with chronic socks doesn’t work very well at all. But I can’t see much in the way of any more optimal methods (other than Tachy Goes to Coventry which itself isn’t an ideal permanent solution).
And, at one point, he said (paraphrasing), “I like to argue, and I don’t see that as a fault.”
Shortly after his “arrival,” when he was starting to get pushback from Dopers on his behavior, he reached out to me, in a private message, to ask for advice on how he could, in fact, “be a better Doper.” I advised him that he should try to steer clear of forums like Great Debates and Politics, because it just seemed to feed his combative nature, to which he replied, “but isn’t being argumentative part of GD etc.”
At any rate, he solicited advice, publicly and privately, from several people, and followed little to none of it.
You guess wrong. He was banned not just for socking but also for being a troll, and for some evidence of trolling, see this thread.
He also had sealion tendencies as well. If he wasn’t a sock he probably still would be gone.
This isn’t to invalidate your original point, you just picked a poor example for this.
I don’t see enjoying an argument as a fault either, and frankly, I think you gave him bad advice. His problem wasn’t that he enjoyed argument - it’s that he was bad at it, probably intentionally because he was a troll, but possibly (< 1% chance, IMO) he was earnest and just didn’t make an effort to engage with opponents’ arguments.
He’s the first and only person on my ignore list. It seemed like he was purposefully stirring the pot way too much. If he toned it down a bit he would have been fine.
Entirely possible. Personally, I hate arguing, but he asked me, specifically, for my advice on building a positive reputation here, and how he could avoid being seen as a troll. FWIW, this is what I specifically said to him:
Like other people mentioned in several threads he posted in, he wasn’t there to have a civilized argument in GD or P&E - he was there to fight and “slap sheep,” as OldOakTree himself put it. Of course, it was a constant losing battle, as he didn’t even know how to do that.
That’s Martin_Hyde in the Pit.
Hey, it’s pretty easy to mix up stupid people when there’s just so many of them.
Probably best to close this.
If anyone has further questions about why OldOakTree was banned, feel free to send us a PM.