Something to think about as well is that all of the mods here are volunteers, and frankly if I was volunteering to moderate somewhere and one specific post kept causing issues I’d get sick of it. I honestly believe this is the driving factor for most posts getting locked

Upvoted as it's unpopular even if I heavily disagree with it.

Look at the big picture.

There's a high chance that whatever is causing that flamewar - be it a specific topic, or user conflicts, or whatever - will pop up again. And again. And again.

You might enjoy watching two muppets shitposting at each other. Frankly? I do it too. (Sometimes I'm even one of the muppets.) However this gets old really fast and, even if you're emotionally detached of the whole thing, it reaches a point where you roll your eyes and say "fuck, yet another flamewar. I just want to discuss the topic dammit".

Plenty people however do not; and once you allow flamewars, you're basically telling them "if you don't want to see this, fuck off". Some of those will be people who are emotionally invested enough in your community to actually contribute with it, unlike the passing troll stirring trouble.

I will also upvote because unpopular opinion but I don't agree.

The benefit of the fediverse is that you can pick an instance and communities that align with your moderation preferences.

Personally I'd rather they be locked. Every shit fling pushes the thread back to the top of Active.

Plus, communies have rules. Moderators (in theory) enforce those rules. If there is so much rule breaking the moderators can't keep up, it makes sense to just lock the topic and let the unpaid moderator go have a drink.

I think this goes to the core issue of lemmy moderation. You have to vote with your feet.

When some of my messages were removed from beehaw for being "unproductive"... I thought about it, decided they were right for moderating their community the way they wanted, but I was not required to participate especially if my participation would get removed, so I have since blocked every community that moderator had power over. Unfortunately it was one of the beehaw founders, which basically means I've blocked the entirety of beehaw.

Especially when the post is made by a mod in violation of community rules and gets locked when the post gets massively downvoted

Posts should also be locked after a certain amount of time, like a year. It's confusing to have new comments suddenly pop up on an old topic with people not realizing how old the original conversation was and saying stuff like "what do you mean xyz doesn't have this feature? It definitely does because I'm looking right at it." Yeah, that feature was added after the original conversation took place, then you found this old thread from a search engine (not yet a problem for Lemmy). Just let someone make a new post to keep the conversation relevant.

I agree. I disagree with tone policing in mostly every regard and the ridiculous amount of sensitive people everywhere.

The locking happens because too many crybabies hit the report button. Of course civil discourse would be better but I don’t ever see that online. It only happens with a moderator between two people. Or between two people visibly online when they aren’t behind an anonymous nickname and actually have something to lose.

Why are you on a discussion forum for insults? Just go on 4chan or the comment section of YouTube. Or play a RTS with voice chat on. You will hear all the insults you want.

Mods, lock this post