We have decided to ban Pedro for trolling and for insulting a mod while the mod was acting in an official capacity.
Several of you reported him for trolling in the Charlie Kirk thread there, and had those reports rejected by me, so I’d like to take a minute to explain my thinking about how I moderate the Pit.
The Pit was conceived as a release valve where posters could unload their frustrations with other posters, without derailing threads in other forums. As such, a lot of behaviors that are usually considered “trolling” in other forums are explicitly allowed here, including “posting just to get a rise out of other posters.” It is, I feel, axiomatic that saying, “Fuck you, asshole,” to another person is intended solely to provoke them, and that sort of language is explicitly allowed in the Pit. In particular, we received several reports over this post being an “admission of trolling”:
These reports were rejected. If the purpose of an insult in general is to make someone angry or upset, then acknowledging that you’re posting in the Pit for the purpose of making someone angry or upset is simply acknowledging that you’re using the Pit for its intended purpose.
So, why was Pedro banned?
As I said, the Pit serves as a release valve to help keep conversations on the rest of the board on an even keel. It’s not meant as an invitation for anyone to wander in and start abusing the boards at large. It operates under the assumption that the participants are otherwise invested in the board beyond just freely screaming insults at people. Pedro admitted that his only interest in the board was picking fights with liberals in the Pit:
If his primary purpose here was to antagonize the board, then in the view of the moderation staff here, the board is better off without his presence.
This view was cemented when he responded to a moderator PM with:
This was actually the more severe infraction, but obviously does not need nearly as much explanation about why it was unacceptable.
Between his hostility to the boards in general, and to the moderation staff in particular, we have decided to remove him from the boards.
As a post-script, I’d also like to thank everyone who reported his posts. Even when a flag is rejected, we appreciate posters keeping an eye out for the general health of the board, and would always prefer to get too many reports than too few.