This is a fair question. Andrew did indeed address the issue quite eloquently in his reply to this question. I’d like to expand a little on his comments.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there has been a recent influx of new users to Fluther. This has caused a dramatic change to the collective. Most of the new users are wonderful and fit in with the collective swimmingly. But, as in any sufficiently large group, there were a few bad apples, who were bringing down the overall quality of the site.
At its very core, Fluther is a community of users. The quality of the site is indivisible from the quality of the users. We’re are currently working on some new ways to programatically diminish the influence of bad users on the broader community. But, in the short term, we wanted to prune the bad apples from the Fluther tree. Our biggest fear was that these few troublemakers might cause us to lose Fluther’s greatest asset: YOU. The members of the collective who make the site so great!
So, for the first time, and after much deliberation, Andrew, Ben, and I sent and email to these users explaining that we thought they weren’t a good fit for the collective. In all of the cases, there was no particular, single act that triggered the decision. They all had exhibited a pattern of behavior that, in our judgment, was antisocial, inflammatory, or disruptive in their interactions with other members of the Fluther community. We decided that the amount of harm that these users were doing would probably not be offset by any positive contribution they might make in the future.
If you have any questions, concerns or feedback about this decision, all the usual lines of communication are open: feel free to reply to this post or talk about it in the chat room. You can also send us private messages via the feedback form.