Reason: Toxic people and comments hurt good discussion (and even wider readership) and dissuade others from joining in discussions as to such negative interactions. Many online forums have effectively been destroyed or badly diminished by (generally) toxic people running amok and effectively poisoning the well as many here have undoubtedly seen for themselves on various other forums. All healthy societies have some standards for honorable behavior and the willingness to uphold them, and there is no compelling reason IMO why online communities should be fundamentally different in this regard from IRL ones, especially perhaps as many people are much more “brave” in their bad behavior online without the direct threat of widespread shunning or even physical violence in response to such behavior.
I realize that such things can turn into slippery slopes leading to overbearing moderation, though some basic and logical guidelines (like aiming for constructive discussion and avoiding personal attacks) should be relatively easy to recognize and uphold to some reasonable degree, and the fact that this site has apparently to date adopted zero moderation (from what I’ve seen anyways, aside I assume for illegal or illicit posts) suggests that the current team would be able to restrain themselves from going full SJW mode despite the unfortunate trend in the western world for this to occur.
As for implementation and avoiding overreach by activist or overly emotional mods I’m thinking that this could be done by averaging votes, for example ten mods could vote on how much of a standard (/10) there should be for posts here, and also when a questionable case (user) came up could scrape the last ten or twenty comments by that person and vote on the conduct displayed within those comments as compared to the minimal standard agreed upon.
A related IRL account of such a “code of conduct” working, there was a major US university that had a significant problem with cheating (this was ten plus years ago, before the advent of AI). When they simply added in a clause to the tests to the effect of “you agree that you will behave in line with the code of conduct of this university” cheating dropped dramatically, and this IIRC without any other efforts to curtail cheating or even any actual published code of conduct by the university (i.e. the implication that there was a code of conduct at all had a major positive effect).
Again no poll on this due to apparent brigading by two people here in contrast to the small number of others who seem to vote on such things, leading to a likely misleading accounting of the wider views of the userbase of this site.
