Can't post on /canterlot/, obviously, so I'll post it here. It's that or evade, after all.
>>1009843This type of response is ultimately exactly why you get these fights. It's why these fights continue endlessly on your site. It's why they've gone on for years now.
You don't discourage the behavior of the aggressor with this lot.
You don't discourage others insulting and attacking posters by locking threads.
You certainly do nothing to make the people subject to that shit feel like it'll at all be taken care of.
People know at this point, at the end of the day, staff do next to nothing the vast, vast majority of the time when it comes to this type of thing. At most a thread gets locked, and that doesn't mean anything to the person attacking another, and isn't any kind of comfort or defense for the person who was attacked.
The net result is, aggressors attack without concern, and defenders fight back because they know there's no recourse by any other means. There's no way to get rid of rather insulting remarks that have a nasty habbit of spreading across sties
without resorting to engaging. Which results in these fights we see constantly breaking out across the site.
If someone punched you in the face, and you defended yourself, would you be content with someone just saying "hey guys, stop that"? Or at absolute best, both of you getting lectured or punished?
I wouldn't.
And it certainly wouldn't stop me from striking back the next time it happens, either.
You've set up a system where the only recompense is what people can take, themselves. A system in which nobody can adequately rely on you to do it for them.
And it isn't even a good system for that sort of thing. Locked threads and halted arguments mean things rarely come to head, which in turn leaves the embers of that conflict still floating around creating old grudges, hostility, bitterness, and feelings of injustice.
Which to that last one, of course, isn't exactly helped when there's this rather bothersome standard of blaming both sides equally.
I've already washed my hands of all this, metaphorically speaking, so I'll not lecture or condemn you any with this. It's not the point. Point is, you've made a request of me, "begging" me to do something, and this, here, is essentially my way of explaining why the answer is unfortunately "no".
I will defend myself when I am attacked. That is simply how it will be. If it puts you in a difficult position, that's unfortunate, but, not my concern.
