since the community's downvotes and critical comments haven't gotten through to him it would be good to have a mod convey that message.

What do you mean "haven't gotten through to me" in this case? You mean, haven't successfully deterred me? Because clearly I understand them and their significance, and additional measures, like a warning, wouldn't change that fact—it'd just make me more antagonistic.

You don't appreciate the drama even a little? (Only a little surprised.)

It shouldn't be assumed that people who oppose mod influence believe Will's trolliest crap is entertaining - or vice versa.

I'll agree wtih all of that. I couldn't figure out how to vote in this poll on seeing this comment (and I am not an idiot or a newbie). I don't read Will much and I imagine this little jaunt of his says a lot more about Will than about other parts of the world that I am interested in. I don't KNOW that that is the case, but I don't assign a high enough probability to taking value from figuring it out to go about reading all his posts.

Especially when at his trolliest.

(Thanks for making the clarification. I was very worried.)

Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too.

For what it's worth, I didn't, and I've never done similarly. I have three sockpuppets. One is a joke account I've never used. I made it recently. The other has my identity attached to it already—I've made about five comments with it. And the third is for completely anonymous comments. I rarely use the second or the third, and I never use them for voting.

I also haven't voted on the poll with this account, and I only voted on one comment on this post. In general I just don't vote much, mostly because I forget about the option.

I disagree with a ban.

one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.

Which is a reason to treat me nicely—it's not hard to multiply myself by ten. Luckily, I'm the only Will Newsome in the world currently, so I don't think you have much to worry about.

Yes, but moderation is about making the site what it should be for a variety of people, not just me and people who are unshy enough to talk to me directly, or just mods. So I want information. I wield the ban button, but I'm not going to use it as a site customization tool for Alicorn in particular.

Maybe. But moderation isn't a democracy.

On the other hand dictators and tyrants who do stuff people particularly don't like get killed.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH MY OWN OPINION IS THAT THAT'S INCREDIBLY UNLIKELY.

In fact, I commit to causing a lot of headaches for LessWrong and you if you try to delete my account without a month's warning. (Causing headaches for you will be limited to the channel of LessWrong—I'm not threatening you with outside-LessWrong influences in any way. I swear to that.)

My immediate response was to think "Ahh, screw that. Ban!" Given the caveat in the parenthesis however, his declaration gives only a tiny amount of information along the "threat to do harm" front. I more or less expect people banned from a site to be inclined to do detrimental things to that site if they can. That being the case, this threat falls just short of stating the obvious and so I can abandon the initial outraged defiance.

What would a mod do? I can create endless sockpuppets from endless proxies.

It takes you from being an established user associated with a real person that many of us have met in person to just a little vandalism to be ignored.

What makes Will_Newsome trollishness significant is that all else being equal a lot of us want to talk to Will_Newsome, which bipasses our better judgement and makes threads like this more disruptive than they otherwise would be.

These evil sorcerers, dugpas, they call them, cultivate evil for the sake of evil and nothing else. They express themselves in darkness for darkness, without leavening motive. This ardent purity has allowed them to access a secret place of great power, where the cultivation of evil proceeds in exponential fashion. And with it, the furtherance of evil's resulting power.