I have had way too much experience with being the first person to realize vibes are rancid and bail (or split the IRC channel) long before everyone else finally catches up to the same conclusion.

You can tell someone's tendencies LONG before they actually test the waters enough to think they can get away with the bannable thing, it turns out.

I was in a community for seven years that kept letting jerks post until they crossed enough lines to be banned, only to give them a "second chance" after a few months because they claimed to have changed. Second chances turned into third and fourth. I'm so glad I left and I got involved in other communities which ultimately led me to the communities I'm into today surrounded by great peeps.

I still talk to a small handful of those peeps and occasionally they'll vent about dudes who keep being jerks and it's like the same dudes from fifteen years ago. I have no idea how they all have put up with that for so long. You don't need toxic people in your spaces; it's okay.

Here's some supplemental reading that's relevant to this topic if you're interested; it's 19 years old at this point but, as you've observed, very little has changed. https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

Yeah, I've always found it's better to just clean up where the jerk pissed on the rug, then kick em out of my house before they shit on it, too.

this kind of thing has happened on my chat a few times and my response is "knock that shit off before I make you knock it off"

pre-exodus neogaf was not a perfect forum by any means, but one thing i liked about it was a few of the mods learned at some point during gamergate that this kind of boundary-testing nonsense is Hostile Posting and does not need to be entertained if it isn't specifically breaking a rule; you can just ban someone the instant they start Just Asking Questions and everything keeps moving along perfectly fine.

It's kinda wild to me that the Goonstation moderation team is legitimately really good at it, but they are. I think it almost helps that because of the nature of the game they can define it in terms of what sort of jerkish behavior is acceptable and then exclude all else.

But like, every experience I've had with them - even the ones where they're telling me to knock it off, which I'll admit have happened - has ultimately been a good one.