I appreciate what you are saying, and it's a series of useful and material observations.

But I'm personally concerned with something more specific here.

I do want to say I'm not on a witch hunt. I am not angry, but I am worried.

And to date, in the long chain of comments, I'm feeling somewhat unheard, which has the unintended effect that the mod team is banding together to protect one of their own (who needs no protection from me!), rather than giving my concerns an honest audience.

I know this isn't the reality, but the way the conversation progressed, it felt that way.

So maybe we can take this new chatroom as an opportunity for a reset.

I'll try to change my style so I sound less, I don't know, urgent or shrill or vindictive or however I'm coming across.

In turn, I'd like to ask the mod team, tchrist of course included, to discuss the specific observations I've made which have caused me concern.

Logistically, Chat isn't the easiest thing for me, so I imagine this conversation will be asynchronous rather than real time. I'll pop in and out, and I expect others will as well.

All that said, in case anyone is worried, I am not here to have tchrist pilloried or anything (as JAPH, I still have a bit of star-struckness around him, which has only increased with my appreciation of his expertise in English).

The happiest outcome for me would be if Tom decided to recuse himself (both directly and by proxy of direct requests to other mods) from questions which touched on pejorative language. But I am principally concerned with open discussion of the situation which concerns me, and if there is some other happy resolution, that will be fine by me too.

@DanBron You seem really concerned about this.

But the situation you're describing is a well-understood phenomenon that we all have agreed needs addressing (questions/answers about sex/pejoratives are often poor but get lots of traffic).

And one mod takes interest in using the (very) fair functionality implemented to reduce the problems with such things.

I for one am glad that some takes time to do this clean up.

I can see that, in reducing unintelligent content, this might restrict intelligent traffic on concepts that should have coverage (eg, for a rather lame example, whether gangsta and gangster are appreciably different)

Are you concerned that good content is being prevented by this mods behavior?

What I have in mind for this chatroom is to expose barriers to consistent and systematic enforcement. There is already a comment thread about the other issue, I have also recommended that it be escalated to the community managers, and anyone could also open a meta question on it. My request is that this room not become another forum to discuss the same issue.

@DanBron I also appreciate your wanting to reset the tone of that discussion. One of the things about SE that I most value is the emphasis it puts on being respectful and patient, and assuming good intentions.

@SvenYargs I got to see your deleted comment, and I hope you'll repost it. It's exactly the kind of thing I want to review here: any element of the site which is a barrier to consistent and systematic enforcement, whether that barrier is in the site design, or in our community standards, close reasons, or any other kind of rule or guideline.

However, in determining whether something is a barrier, one must also determine what it is a barrier to. I commented yesterday...

So, pre-emptive protection is a barrier. Is the by-product of forcing someone to answer a different question first a worthwhile cost for stopping a potential slew of poor answers?

I consider that that is a price worth imposing.

@AndrewLeach Well, yes, a barrier to entry. I'm inquiring more into barriers to fair enforcement. SvenYargs was making the point at the top that we do not want rules which exist more or less to justify abuse of bureaucratic power. If such rules exist they are barriers to fair enforcement.

@AndrewLeach So we have this community guideline, saying we can pre-emptively protect questions. It has the express purpose of letting experienced users prevent a flood of drive-by answer posts which are non-answers: guesses, copypasta, and so on. It's a barrier to entry. But suppose it also has the tacit purpose, or just a de-facto effect, of letting experienced users target pet peeves? Then you could say it a barrier to fair enforcement.

To put it maybe a better way, if the pre-emption rule as written provides safe haven for an unfair practice, how can it be rewritten so that it doesn't? @SvenYargs Is that a fair way of putting it?

Or should I say, if the rule as written is providing safe haven for an unfair practice. Let's not spend time fixing things that aren't broken.

@MetaEd I think I would need to have explained to me how a rule (any rule) provides a safe haven for an unfair practice. That explanation should also take into account how easily any unfair practice might be reversed.

@AndrewLeach Yes. I would also add, how likely it is to be reversed. For example, how likely is it to be detected?