I think they clearly expressed they were going through some hard times. I don’t think that’s necessarily a sin. And I don’t think one comment we all disagree (landlords) is a good lone reason to ban. Did I miss something? Not trying to stir the pot I just think patience and compassion should always come first.
Yes, we need to be better than the larger platforms that drove us for this exact reason (r/communism, Reddit in general, etc.). I remember forums like r/communism being much more diverse and open to differing opinions even a few years ago, and it was what made the community so accessible to a larger audience that wouldn’t have otherwise bothered. I feel like we need more of that here. We need to be more tolerant of people’s different takes on ML and socialism in general, while also using facts and evidence to disprove them.
I am also very in favor of this because of radicalization. I have absolutely no experience running or moderating any sort of online community so I can appreciate that this might be dumb, but to me I wouldn’t even ban openly belligerent liberals or fascists in hopes of working the long game and changing their perspective slowly behind closed doors (or, at the very least, the minds of silent lurkers represented by such people representing their ideologies having their points torn apart). I know the risk of corruption though, if for example GZD or lemmygrad had done that I would have been a severe risk of slowly losing its ML backbone, there’s definitely pros and cons to it.