What Being Forced To Be “Nice” and “Respectful” (a.k.a a pushover) Taught Me
While I was writing on Quora, there was a very controversial implementation of something called BNBR — Be Nice, Be Respectful. It is Quora’s most actively enforced rule, and it is the best and worst part of the site.
BNBR prevents cyberbullying, to an extent. If someone is bothering you, you report them and block them and moderation may or may not deal with it. As you get more popular, you have to be more careful about following BNBR. Obscure writers can get away with very few violations, because no one cares about them unless they start gaining traction and therefore their stuff is ignored, but the popular writers get them whenever they mildly violate the policy at any moment, whether in a comment, message, post, or answer. Popular writers tend to have hundreds and often thousands of comments and answers (I had 2,000 answers and about 15–30,000 comments at the time of my ban), and each of those can be a violation. The policy is so messy that sometimes you’ll get multiple violations on the exact same thing, which really shouldn’t happen. So, you can get a violation on 0.01% of your stuff and then get banned (which is what happened to me).
You’re unable to make a new account once you’ve already made one (it’s called sockpuppetting and you can get both accounts banned for it), but once…
