[nyolfen]

>People got banned from forums for being irreverent dicks before and no one batted an eye.

you're poorly versed in internet culture and history. many internet subcultures have axiomatically rejected moderation because, surprise, giving power to anonymous and unaccountable peers frequently results in abuses. you're confusing your own lack of concern and love of arbitrary authority with the opinions of others.

[astrodust]

Managing a community is often a careful balance between handing over too much power to moderators who can abuse their powers and limiting moderators to the point where they're ineffective and the user base can't be controlled.

I've seen this dynamic play out first on tiny communities like MUDs where you'd have, at most, a thousand people. Later the pattern repeated over and over at larger and larger scales, where more recently you see entire platforms like Reddit suffering from the same issues. Each order of magnitude increase in user base makes the threats grow far more exponentially in scale.

Soon the whole internet will become rotten, culturally speaking.