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I will second that the moderators deserve credit for the change in "tone" as you put it. But it is not really a change in tone, but rather that the hold-on-a-seconders, whose "tone" is generally utterly anodyne in comparison to the reflexive vituperation they receive (not that it bothers me) have been warned off contributing. And so it goes.

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The contributions of those anodyne 'hold-on-a-seconders' should not be missed. There was a reflexive script that they worked off that sounded all very mature but pretty much came down to people wandering into every thread and reminding everyone that sometimes victims lie.

They never had any specific reason to do this; it was never the case that these guys had new information. They just felt consistently moved to remind us all that No-one Really Can Know All The Facts every time an allegation turned up, like they had just invented epistemology and wanted to tell the world.

Exactly this. It's whataboutism designed to discredit and damage the victims and to that end I actively don't respect (and do downvote, and sometimes flag) those posts.

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