Ultimately I agree, I think, but I see a lot of it both ways. On the one hand, I hate that crap and it would be nice to never see it. But I don’t even block people I dislike unless they’re just trolls - I don’t want to bubble myself. On the other hand, this is a federated platform. If people want to, they can run their own community without banned artists, and the people who really value that exposure can just go there periodically. But then, if the community really hates the Jago shit, then it seems like a culture can emerge of just shaming and not upvoting such posts. But on the other hand, the community probably won’t attain that level of responsibility long term.

I think there’s a lot of bad things and good things that come out of banning specific artists. And I think there was enough debate in your first post that it’s not quite accurate for you to say “this is what we want”. Although ironically I end up in agreement between you so maybe I’m just wanting unrealistic consensus :)

I feel like we already have the mechanism of downvotes for dealing with bad content. You’ll always have artists with generally bad takes, artists with generally good takes but some bad ones, etc… So you’re NEVER gonna reach a state where shitty stupid stuff isn’t posted. And its not like we’re gonna start to discuss banning some unknown random artist based on one comic that contains transphobia or something - it’s just not worth the effort and clutter unless its a widespread, frequently posted, prolific artist like Jago. In those cases, we should downvote and move on.

I think what makes it complex for me is:

What I REALLY want is a community that is principled and conscientious enough about what they upvote that we don’t need moderators and banlists to caretake the content for us. I want a community that can let a few Jagoposts through in case a good discussion pops up, or people are having fun ragging on it, and that still absolutely crushes these posts under downvotes and eventually organically scares off the kinds of dumbasses who really like it. I prefer this because it limits moderator power scope, it limits community meta debates like this one, and ultimately because a principled and conscientious population is awesome to have. The best communities I’ve ever been in online are essentially self-moderating. There are always mods or at least admins, but they have very little to do and it’s usually bland custodial things (deleting duplicate posts, etc.)

But I understand that in reality, we probably won’t have a such a principled and conscientious community, and therefore we probably do need to offload some of that curation responsibility that really should lie on the users, to the moderators - in the form of ban lists.

Ultimately I think I agree with banning artists in a way that is:

1. Not preemptive
2. As determined on an individual basis by community discussion in meta posts like this
3. Limited in scope only to artists whose comics that are actually annoying the community

I’m just disappointed that it means admitting the community cannot effectively self-moderate on a post-by-post basis. But I think as long as it’s still up to community discussion what goes on the ban list, that’s pretty reasonable since it allows us to only need to think about the provenance and context of an artist every once in awhile rather than on every post. It’s really a more efficient way to go about it and makes a more psychologically relaxed experience in general. Kind of like going to an organic grocery store is nice because you no longer need to check every product label for artificial coloring.