Why so much emphasis on rules? If someone is clearly doing something wrong, you don't need a rule violation. If someone is not clearly doing something wrong, then don't ban them. This way, there is no possibility for rules lawyering.
The goal of an online community is to be a space where people interact, so banning someone from interacting is a failure to succeed at the goal, but so is allowing someone to remain to the point where others choose to leave voluntarily.
The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.
You give them warnings, time-limited bans, etc. I wasn't trying to say it has to be binary, I was saying the rules are given too much emphasis by some people when they really don't matter at all.
E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.
