Many of us warned you at the outset of DK5: changing the rule where an HR was public to the current rule where flags are anonymous would lead to more abuse and more discord, rather than less. You felt otherwise. With respect: you should reassess.
Under the old rules, the community would get involved when an HR seemed unwarranted. The flag-giver would be held to account. People would discuss HR’s among themselves. From the thousands of such discussions a sense of the community standards emerged. That is how community moderation is supposed to work.
But you, and apparently certain admins, felt such discussions were a negative, distracting from the substantive commentary. Needless pissing contests, you said. This place will be better, and more focused, if we can cut all that pointless arguing out. So you made the formerly public HR into the anonymous flag.
The result is that now we have daily rec list diaries about the abuses of anonymous flags. We have numerous long-time, valued members being handed time-outs over arbitrary flags handed out by a few anonymous users. We have valued, long-time members leaving, and more who won’t diary any more, because anonymous users single them out, hitting them with flags in comments.
This is not about the primaries. I was here the last time we had a contested primary. It was nowhere near this bad. This is a structural flaw, added with the best intentions, to be sure, but which has fractured this site to its very foundations.
Daily Kos is broken, Markos. Please fix it, before it’s too late.