Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in space and time and select them appropriately, and you can leave them unattended for months on end. Well-layered gardens (like food forests but also my own flower gardens which never get weeded) also better support their members as each plant fills functions which help the other plants. We need well-layered on-line communities, ones where…

I failed to get through the entire article. It repeats memes I have seen before that I see as an incomplete grasp of the situation at best. I have been a moderator. I also was a full time parent for a long time. These two things have a lot in common. It isn't true that your choices are either censorship or just letting some fool ruin everything. You can engage fools, welcome them, be kind, educate them and help them…

Being a relatively new community, Stack Overflow has been wrestling with these issues for some time. Most recently, Michael Pryor [1] posted a topic [2] questioning the need for closing questions, which, ironically, has been closed 7 times [3], and generated a lengthy (but otherwise well-mannered) discussion with some people on both sides of the isle and many others in between, culminating in a blog post [4] about what constitutes an acceptable question. Historically, my position has been similar to…

To be honest, while I do see his point to some degree (just about every webmaster forum has become an utter cesspool due to a lack of moderation and a flood of idiotic posts and signature spammers), I'd also like to point out that being too harsh can kill a site just as quickly. For one thing, it makes newer users feel a bit too scared to start contributing, especially if everything slightly below quality standards get removed immediatedly. And…