Consideration is by policy not to be used for incivility and impolite posts; I’d definitely like to see that changed, but it is a cultural assumption that these posts must be permitted or we’re “censoring” people.

No, it is just that the same principle applies: The best remedy for bad speech is to counter it with good speech.

It is also significantly because that, without the discouragement against reaping of relatively minor infractions (such as being "impolite"), the result is rather easy to predict and has already been seen and is not pretty. But first, let me quickly describe the scenario where reaping "impolite" nodes can work rather well.

If you have a very small and cohesive team of people dedicated to enforcing what they consider to be a sufficiently positive tone, then it can be quite beneficial for that team to suppress contributions that only rise to the level of "significantly impolite". On the internet w/o a physical location shared by the team members, such a team is very often just a single person.

In such scenarios, it often works even better if new nodes are hidden until they are approved by the team, and not just because it prevents a flood of negative posts being made before the team can react. I think people are less disturbed by "my submission was not approved" than by "my submission was posted and then later deleted".

PerlMonks, having been on-line for this long, has not had any dedicated, cohesive team survive that long no matter the purpose. There have been a few teams that stayed relatively dedicated for quite a while and were even moderately cohesive, but each failed to stay even close to that for even a fraction of the lifespan of PerlMonks. And handling membership churn is significantly tricky, especially when trying to stay high on the "cohesive" and "dedicated" scales. Heck, even just adequately detecting churn is a big problem.

The mechanisms that have proved most beneficial to PerlMonks are ones where new members automatically gain additional abilities simply by interacting enough with the site (XP is a measurement of site participation with a bias toward faster rewards for constructive participation).

So the population of enforcers is going to be some fraction of the full membership. To get sufficient "dedication" the fraction can't be tiny. To counteract the lack of cohesion, you add consensus voting, which means you need an even larger fraction since it takes at least a handful of like-minded senior members (not just one) to cause an action.

This gets us to something at least roughly like the current "consideration" system.

Now, if you throw the official target space of nodes up nice and wide by including such minor infractions as "impolite", then you quickly notice problems. Excluding everything that, say, tye finds offensively rude would likely be a net win (and not because tye is an exceptionally good judge of manners). But suppressing everything that any one of the hundreds of senior members finds troubling impolite with the minor catch that they have to get 4 others to agree with them, that quickly leads to tons of things being suppressed just because several people didn't understand them (for example). And that leads to lots of grousing and other reactions to a bunch of specific cases of this or that being suppressed. Pretty soon the site is more about arguing and complaining about what should or shouldn't be suppressed than it is about discussing Perl.

I much prefer the relatively rare nasty reply and relatively rare flame fest that PerlMonks currently endures to the constant bickering around meta arguments about rampant node suppression.

The biggest current problem I see with anonymonk is the number of members who feel that they are justified in swiping at somebody just because they posted anonymously. If you can't handle anonymous postings, then you shouldn't respond to them.

I'm constantly considering ideas for adjusting how anonymous posting works at PerlMonks. Most of the ideas I read about or come up with don't quite reach the bar of being very likely to be a net win, much less being worth the effort to try. I don't think this suggestion reaches that bar, either.