Re: Re: Re: Reputation and Accountability (tye)

[dws]

The issue at hand is that borging is anonymous. No one should wield anonymous power over public conversation.

I disagree. First, borging isn't completely anonymous. There's a relatively small number of "community elders" who have been vested with that power and who have been charged with the responsibility to use that power wisely. From what's been said here, it seems that there's no issue with responsibility in this particular case.

Next, in any civil society, there needs to be some mechanism for enforcing a "time out" when things get out of hand. The benefit of that enforcement coming from "the system" is, as tye has said, that it's harder to pick a fight with the system. The fight gets defused. At most, it gets turned into a meta-argument (like this one). Meta arguments are healthy, if they're undertaken civilly.

Perlmonks remains a remarkably civil place for several reasons, among them being feedback. When somebody comes in here and acts badly, they get feedback, ranging from negative votes, to replies pointing out the error of their behavior, to verbal (CB) reminders, to borging, to banning. Without those mechanisms--particularly without an escalation path that includes temporary CB silencing--I believe this place would be a mess.