Nice post. I agree with much of what you said, and in my worthless opinion of myself, I'm pretty light handed when it comes to moderation here. However, I've been here at TMC long enough to know that arguments between strong willed individuals who both must get the last word will entirely ruin a thread. The goal of moderation, as I see it, is to encourage and enable valuable discourse, and to disincentivize pointless infighting. In other words, moderators should endeavor to improve the signal to noise ratio. This being the Internet, there are people who get joy out of ruffling others' feathers for no other reason than to do it. That's why the site has rules, and why moderators are bound to enforce those rules. The TMC rules are listed at the bottom of every page under the link "Terms of Service."
One of the things I like about the way moderation is set up at TMC (done before my tenure as a moderator) is that we infrequently delete posts or lock threads. There are, of course, exceptions. Moving posts away allows members to see what was said, or to copy and paste the valuable things they said and post them back into the thread without the personal attacks. The definition of the word moderator is, after all "a mediator or arbiter," so getting between two people who are snipping at each other is precisely the definition of the job. And moving "snippy" posts away quickly nearly always works. I've seen the difference between handling a report within minutes and within days.
Your post insinuates that forums mimic real life conversations. I have always tried to behave here at TMC as if I were meeting with others face to face. However, if you think that people on the Internet act the way that they would in person, I would like you to PM me the forums you moderated so I can spend the rest of my life there. They sound like glorious places.
Tesla is a polarizing company for reasons I don't pretend to fully understand. It has publicly traded stock that has (or at least had) a very high level of short interest. It represents, to some, an environmental statement, which therefore plays into some politically charged ideas, at least in the US. There are people who think it's a Ponzi scheme, and others who are passionate about the company to the point of near intimacy. So I am going to go out on a limb and say that, while it isn't alone in this space, it brings up topics that have the tendency to exacerbate the already strong opinions and outrage sowed in online environments.
My experience is that every environment has its own set of rules that work. I've worked at and run different companies. There is no boilerplate framework that can be applied successfully across all environments, and in many cases, the rules and customs grow organically from the environment in which they're nurtured. I believe that's what is seen here at TMC - a set of rules that have worked, at least to date, in keeping the signal to noise ratio within reasonable boundaries. Surely more work can be done, and I'm always open to criticism of my moderation decisions so that I can improve.
