I hear you, and thanks for the honest and thoughtful reply. And one option would have been to hide all the earlier stuff that was getting into the realm of topics that I didn’t think were healthy or relevant to the conversation and forum so that there wouldln’t have been something to quote and weigh in on there. But despite what people may think I really don’t like hiding or editing posts, and I think in general we moderate things pretty lightly here, so I left them up and added some posts with staff colors that asked people to keep to a narrowly-defined topic. Maybe actually hiding more would be better for those situations? Tough to say and we definitely won’t always get things right.
But, one thing I feel is pretty important is to try and keep the site focused on iNat and nature-related things because unfortunately political discussion and similarly heated topics can go south very quickly online and iNat also doesn’t have any business hosting those discussions. It’s truly great that people have found a community here and I think that makes us want to discuss these important things with the people we’ve come to know here, but we’re just not the space for those kinds of discussions. And the more time I spend moderating here, the less time I have to interface with our team and file bug reports or potentional improvements for them to consider and implement.