The fine art of balancing civility vs. free speech

[Varsoon]

I think that so long as you consider that this site is meant to be PG in content,
that hate-speech is banned,
and that insults directed towards players themselves are generally considered abusive,
you get to what is a fairly solid standard for how players should conduct themselves. If players still manage to be unpleasantly inflammatory under these regulations without (somehow) breaking any, then it's up to the moderator to warn a player and/or force-replace them if their play is compromising the game.

However, I fully acknowledge and sometimes (too passionately, even) embrace that mafia is a game of rhetoric, and rhetoric can be aggressive and without quarter for one's opponent. This is still a game about using words to convince a mass of players to LYNCH a target, after all.

[Varsoon]

Outside of the moderator's scope, however, I do side with Nero here:
If a player's rhetoric isn't conducive towards you solving the game and you have no better scumread, lynch that player. If they're town, it teaches them an important lesson in being more pleasant, and if they're scum, good job!
If you personally can not handle the way in which a player approaches games and deploys their rhetoric, avoid playing with that player. I don't avoid players, myself, as I want to challenge myself to play with and overcome these sort of obstacles, but I understand how absolutely infuriating, annoying, depressing, and/or awful it can be to play with certain individuals and if I wasn't the kind of person who actually enjoyed those sensations to a degree while having an ethos of competition without barriers, I'd probably be hard-blacklisting some folks.

[Varsoon]

I think it'd make me reconsider a lot in general, though if I was town and being toxic, I'd be resentful at first for them not focusing on the game, but if I was lynched over it because I was legitimately driving the game away from being solved, that's fine.

Like that one game where that happened recently.

[Varsoon]

Here's the big thing that I think doesn't happen as much as it should:
One of the core tenets of this site is to respect each other.
If someone is posting in a way that makes you uncomfortable or upset and you kindly ask them to tone down their rhetoric and they don't, then they're not respecting you. You can push a wagon without attacking a player themselves. That said, I feel like a lot of players don't differentiate between their play being attacked and themselves being attacked.