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Nornagest comments on Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Options have a habit of becoming mandatory over time as norms adjust to their presence. Make it possible to ignore people and I guarantee that a year later, when the next white supremacist or militant Maoist or Randroid or whatever shows up, you'll get people saying that it's not a problem, everyone just needs to ignore them and they'll never need to see them again. I further guarantee that said white supremacists etc. will respond to this by settling down and carving out hateful little niches for themselves in the forum ecosystem, as the people that care start dropping them into their killfiles and stop downvoting their posts or leaving angry responses or, y'know, actually proving them wrong.
All of which comes to a huge waste of effort, because...
...you should now imagine that process being repeated by some large fraction of the two thousand users on this forum, every time a problem (excuse me, controversial) user shows up or creates a new sockpuppet. Doesn't look so trivial now, does it?
Some people want centrally enforced ideological litmus tests, and some don't.
Scales linearly. Click <ignore>, and they're gone, for everyone who doesn't want to see them. Nothing could be simpler. An order of magnitude (or two) less sound and fury than we've spent on Eugine.
The entire point is that we can and should do a lot better than O(n).
We haven't. To quote myself:
The recent ban was executed through administrative action. That's O(1), albeit apparently with a high constant factor if Kaj's posts are to be trusted. There's been a lot of drama surrounding it, but that doesn't have anything to do with scalability.
(Personally, I'd say most of the drama has to do with preexisting cultural and administrative issues that this has dragged squirming into the light, and takes the late unpleasantness as a proximate rather than an ultimate cause, but we may reasonably disagree on that point.)