one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a “free and fair environment” (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we can’t just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things — greed, or being fascists themselves.

and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow they’re practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesn’t make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.

it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I won’t give their bullshit transit on any system I control. it’s always been surprising to me how many sysops consider “kick out the fucking fascists” an unworkable policy when it’s very easy to implement — it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.