Having frequented a few of the paragons of open discussion, I can tell you that they regularly ban users as well. My takeaway isn't necessarily hypocrisy (alth

Having frequented a few of the paragons of open discussion, I can tell you that they regularly ban users as well. My takeaway isn't necessarily hypocrisy (although a few of them are certainly full of that), it's that moderation is hard because of the never-ending wave of people trying to clog up public discourse for a variety of crappy reasons. Jeff Atwood (one of the founders of Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, developer of Discourse) has some pretty insightful things to say about community management.