Welcome to the paradox of tolerance 
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I have become much less active over the last year(s?) and sentences like this (not trying to pick on you, Patron, it’s just the most readily available example in this thread) are what pushes me away. I truly believe this sentiment is in direct opposition to the spirit of FIRE.
To me (I ultimately come from the Early Retirement Extreme school), FIRE is about squirreling away enough so I can live a good life, and being content with it. Then, it’s likely all about improving the community around myself (publicly know example would be MMM).
Many of the messages we’re discussing here are all pushing boundaries of morals, tolerance and legality. As described before, this does not align with my view of FIRE (getting to the position of being capable of being a better human) and therefore I see such messages as hostile to my ideals. With more and more such messages, I just feel less welcome overall. And the hard thing about such a feeling is that it’s just that – a feeling, and not something that could be put into rules.
This post is ultimately not actionable. But I hope I can put some words to my otherwise silent viewpoint.
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I must have missed or not remember that other thread - but the double standard certainly isn’t lost on me.
That said, reiterating it half a dozen times over several posts isn’t just holding up the mirror. That’s adoption.
Absolutely. It’s the combination of what you said, how you phrased it (and, maybe, even who said it, to be honest). And the moral judgement you proclaimed. I’m at this point not giving any judgement myself - I am just stating how I believe it’s perceived by many people.
I stand by my opinion, if you take into account what he said, how he said it - and judged it.
- “I think single mothers face a very difficult life and aren’t supported enough by society and the government. We should support them better financially”.
- “I think you should only get kids if you can afford them. Single mothers on welfare don’t own up to their mistakes. We spent too much many on them - money that others have earned”
Yes, these 
are two differing opinions that might be shared by larger parts of society.
The radical way he stated, phrased it - and his own moral judgement on it? No. I refuse to believe that (though again, I’m withholding my own judgement here).
I definitely agree that to his credit he did not become personal or resort to personal attacks. That said, while not personally attacking an individual, comparing single mothers to parasites and accusing (holding up the mirror or not) and accusations of intolerance weren’t entirely “polite” either, IMO.
Y’all may try to find the right policy that balances all considerable aspects for another year, but by then the forum will be dead. The simple answer is that @Patron is killing this platform, not because he is doing something against the rule, or because of his extreme views as such, but because he relentlessly and unapologetically overshadows any and all discussion. The logical conclusion is to simply ask him to step away and ultimately ban him, rule violation or not.
To @Patron: I am impressed by your time and effort you put into your contribution here, especially as in everything I have ever seen no discussion amounted to anything much at all in the end (neither you nor the other side changed their view). And I applaud your own conclusion to leave this forum, hoping you follow through.
By the way: That is exactly why many forums ban political discussion. Discuss tax optimization? Sure. Discuss if taxes in general are theft and unjust? Nope.
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I would say it’s not about the fringe but about the agressiveness. Qualifying of parasites people who are in a situation where luck may have had something to play, and who are just using the tools (social programs) that are offered by society (and as such, that are within their right to make use of, just as using tax optimization tactics is fair game for wealthier people to do) is taking it one step too far in my opinion.
In this specific example, I didn’t know how to respond to that. Ignoring it? It would somehow show some form of consent and that this kind of thinking can be considered normal, which isn’t an image I want to project. My feeling and consequent reaction has been to harden my own language to try and establish that a limit had been broken and that you can’t express verbal violence without being ready to deal with it yourself. Things can escalate from there and it becomes very hard to keep a friendly, if disagreeing, conversation going on from that point.
They may be not correct too, which is why we could benefit from some more moderation interference in these kinds of instance. I’m all for putting the right people in the right position (and you guys are the right people) and relying more on discretional judgment than hard rules, and there is a pannel of sanctions that can be applied before a ban (first would be a PM warning kindly but firmly that this isn’t welcome behavior). It takes a lot of time and mental energy to deal with the reclamations with this kind of moderating so I can totally understand a more loose policy with very limited moderational intervention as seems to have been applied up to now.
I am thankful for your (the moderators’) time and wouldn’t want you to start to have reluctance feelings when logging in so whatever adjustment may be made, it needs to be something you’d find acceptable to deal with in my opinion.
I think we have become somewhat numb to your direct and agressive discourse (it may be reciprocal, you may become numb to our own way to express ourselves) and have started to feel it is adequate to respond to it with verbal violence. It feels like it to me anyway and that is not ok, which is why I think we would gain from taking a few steps back and not deal with these kinds of topics for some time.
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After sleeping a bit on my post, I think I identified a big part of what pushes me away: Statements of Absolute Truth. When an entire post asserts harsh opinions (or facts, it’s about the tone, not the actual content) and leaves no way to engage, it feels like I’m driving through town reading graffiti instead of participating in a conversation.
The (to me) nice posts are the ones where people show their viewpoints and ask for feedback, synthesize other posts into more actionable advice, recommend (not command) alternative options, share resources, and so on.
Yes, that’s just what happens, and while I think it’s commendable that you’re able to put up with so much, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so and just disengage if I don’t see the possibility of having my counterpart learn or adapt within a reasonable amount of conversation. In this case, I just end up leaving the discussion (explicit example here) and also won’t read on because I don’t consider their input to be valuable enough.
Here’s my input for a possible moderation policy:
- Encourage engaging, productive and civil discussion.
- Discourage posts that do not add information (just repeating previous posts)
- Discourage posts that do not produce constructive conversations
- Liberally use nudges to guide and educate people (or threads) towards better discussions
- How about starting with 3 hour cooldowns for aggressive-turning threads or posters? This is strong enough to make it a good signal, but not bad enough that it interrupts normal conversation
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Your proposals, while I like them, would require mods to read every thread top to bottom and evaluate if a certain wall of text brings added value, is productive or actionable. It’s not practically doable. It has to be crowd-sourced. What the community looks like is shaped by it’s most active members. You need to flag posts, or some of you need to apply for a leader badge and do part of the job.
All you have to do now is to ban Patron, who is obviously not leaving by himself despite of what had been said. I don’t see anyone else disturbing forum’s atmosphere to such extent.
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This is not about opinions, but about constant aggressive behavior that puts off other people. You keep talking about the echo chamber, well, I don’t want this forum to become Patron’s echo chamber because others are fed up and see no point in arguing with someone who is not interested in other’s opinions.
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Just to let you know what is possible for a mod. I can deactivate, suspend, silence or anonymize his account.
I can’t delete the account:
Users can’t be deleted if they have posts. Delete all posts before trying to delete a user. (Posts older than 60 days old can’t be deleted.)
I can’t delete the posts:
Can’t delete all posts because the user has more than 15 posts. (delete_all_posts_max)
This is probably some parameter which can be edited by the admin.
I know about right to privacy and GDPR and all, but it really sucks for the forum if an old user deletes over 1000 of his posts. This leaves the forum gutted, threads hard to follow, and it anyway does not remove all your content. All the quoted text remains, I think. And all the webscrapers which archive the Internet have already copied all the messages ten times over, so you won’t get this fully erased, you can only make it harder to access. I think every solution here is a bad one. I wonder what they do in other, larger forums.
Btw, apart from Patron, there are two other users who have been removing hundreds of their posts in the last days, I guess also per script.
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I would ask people to kindly reconsider deleting inputs from the “helpful advice” threads. Otherwise the input of the other members who took the time to reply after you becomes meaningless. @Patron and @Teacup you both made a lot of helpful and expert contributions on such topics so it would be a shame on multiple levels
I am referring to threads about personal improvement & quality of life as @bojack defined above. (I am not fussed whether or not the politics or coffee threads get corrupted)
Could political discussions where Patron made a high % of the posts be hidden from the forum homepage? These threads won’t make sense if he is deleting his contributions
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I find it strange that the owner of the forum is not chiming in. The forum is one of the reasons he’s making money. I’d be here in a heartbeat if I see things going down.
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How do we close this discussion ?
I think most of us including both mods are of the opinion that in the future we should avoid politics.
If there is any doubt we could have a popular vote, this is Switzerland after all! :
"Comments in the forum should be relevant to personal improvement & quality of life "
Yes / no
(Wording can surely be refined by others )
well that was brought up by @MrCheese a while ago and the community here was not very receptive. it’s a funny situation for sure.
also @TeaCup fair point, one can see it in this thread as well where @bojack doesn’t want to have moderation rules. he phrased it as being because the rules would still have the moderator be subjective instead of seeing it as an opportunity to have some clear guidelines that would avert discussions like this thread.
sometimes this forum feels like if you tick off one of the mods you’re gonna get burned. sorry @bojack for singling you out again on this one, but sometimes you’re writing style is brash and off-putting even when you argue with facts. makes me not really want to engage at all, although the content is valuable.
@bojack & @Julianek i hang out and shitpost quite a big on r/financialindependence and they have a really good set of rules for moderation. that subreddit has 1M users and a handful of mods which mod for free just as you guys do here. so maybe we could get inspired from those rules to some extent if we want to go that way.
now, back to my passive stance in this forum… hopefully the community will find its way and a good resource won’t whither away.
ps.: @bojack i am sure you’d be a lovely person that i’d easily get along with would should i meet you in real life
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I don’t think we should close this discussion, it will die by itself once everybody will think they have said everything they wanted. Moderation is an important topic and it is important that everybody can express themselves about it until they feel they have been able/allowed to contribute everything they wanted on the topic. Keeping things unsaid and/or frustrations can only harm in the future.
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This is weird, I never banned or suspended anyone. I didn’t delete anyone’s post on my own discretion. I only ever react to flags, which anyway come super rarely. How come you mention me in a sentence about getting burned? How can you imply that I’m a mod that should be feared?
I think I’m self-aware of that. Sometimes I write a post, re-read it and think it’s brash, as you said. Sometimes I’ll rewrite, sometimes I say screw that and press send. Because I’m just a human being and I write what I think and how I feel. If I’m agitated, I will write in an agitated way. I will not hide behind a facade of politeness. However that’s not how I act when it comes to modding decisions. There I will think it over 3 times before I do anything.
Honestly, I’m probably under-qualified to be a mod. I do not use reddit and I’m not active on any other forum than this (only one other discord server). I do not use the Internet to the extent that I used to when I was a student. So I don’t know what is best practice and what can be applied. I don’t run this place, a moderator is not a manager, I’m just reviewing flags from time to time, and I split offtopic discussions, that’s all. Any kind of expectation towards me regarding keeping order in the forum is misguided.
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I hoped we were coming to a consensus and might be ready to agree a way forward but apologies if I was too presumptuous.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
I had been on other investments forum and this behaviour happened as well.
Doing nothing will push people from this community.
Hey there,
Just so you don’t think I’m silently ignoring the discussion going on here: I got some private issues that keep me busy these days.
The forum did grow since @Bojack and @Julianek joined as mods. It seems it’s time to bring some updates on how we self-org it.
I will check in the upcoming weeks how to best bring more clarity on what is ok and what not. Thanks for the hint to the Reddit moderation rules, too.
Until then, my hope with this community is that we remain helpful and supportive with each other, and respecting different opinions (as long as they are brought in a non-imposing manner).
Take care,
MP
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never said you banned or suspended anyone. it’s probably because of the text communication that goes on the forum. i do genuinely believe you’d be very cool in person. we all have our ups and down, you just let them through in your writing more than others. and as you mention, as a human we all have emotions and passions, but still politeness is a good quality to have, independent of your state in the moment.
in any case, no beef with you, you’re definitely not the hallmark of such behavior on here. and again, sorry to have singled you out as an example, didn’t want to go dig for everyone though. i generally stay away from the discussion when it gets heated or emotions seep in.
last, but not least, you actually do a great job modding. keep up the good (free 
) work!