I really don't think Remy has done anything harmful, mostly the case seems to be that he's annoying/weird (true) and disagrees with pro politically (irrelevant). If the metric here is that he's annoying, there are a lot of way more annoying people on the site who contribute less substance. He's also more responsive to small moderation measures than the other sad cases floating around, probably because his IQ is at least standard deviation above lukewarm.
I found that Con effectively countered all of pro's arguments in ways which he couldn't recover from.
When it comes to arguments about maintaining a civil community which attracts new users interested in intellectual debates, con retorts that the community can police itself, as other standard social groups do, without rigid moderation. Pro's original argument was that careful cultivation would make the website more civil or inviting, but in his reply to pro's point he uses an example of a user who was 'wrongly' pushed out by mob sentiment. That user was famous for debating beastiality, a fringe issue that would be deeply offputting to your average prospective user - he's essentially hoisting himself on his own petard here. If you showed a normie two threads, one on bog standard politics in which people were calling each other idiots and morons, and one in which a dude is discussing the ethics of fucking dogs, they would be way more put off by the latter. For this reason, I found the argument really unconvincing.
I found Con's revelation of the optional filtering feature also undermined much of Pro's points in this vein. On both prongs of this argument, I felt that his vision and plan for the future moderation of the site would cultivate a more vibrant and enjoyable space for debate.
When it came to arguments about DDO's past, I also found Pro's points unconvincing as he mostly argued based on motivation - for example, pointing out that Airmax didn't stop moderating because he wanted a laissez-fair policy, he did it because he didn't have enough time to do so. That doesn't change the fact that the site reached its peak when policy was lax. If the chef accidentally dumps in too much of one ingredient and the dish turns out better, he isn't going to go back to making it the old way just because the additional change was unintentional. Con simply reinforcing the fact that this period was the 'golden age' of DDO carries the day because it's what ultimately matters.
Con's stance of curating homepage content also neuter's Pro's concerns about SEO optimization, his constant references to low-moderation platforms as being very successful are also not really effectively countered by Pro as a counterfactual to what he proposes. Finally, I feel that pro overly relied on clumsy analogies to courtrooms and retail stores which Con easily dispelled by pointing out why a digital space serves a radically different purpose to any of the analogized spaces/institutions.
While I felt that Pro had some points on the side at the beginning of the debate (SEO concerns, approachability concerns) I feel like Con had thoroughly dismantled each of them by the end of the debate.
