People get upset about the warning because it's completely unacceptable in 2018. What would you do if you boss made you wear a red miss America sash if you made a mistake or said something dumb. How about if teachers did that a school. Its fucking laughable people would be outraged. Here it's done and you have no say no rebuttal it's shut up and wear the dunce cap or get banned. How does that promote anything positive.
Maybe you weren't around on the forum most of us came from. There, if you messed up you would be given a custom tag that you couldn't change, that would be like an actual dunce cap you couldn't take off. Furthermore, people would take bans for things we warn for, and other posters wouldn't know why. Here you get chances, and here while we do ask people to take issues about moderation to moderators or admins in pms, you'll notice that despite publically questioning how we do things here, you haven't been warned, let alone banned.
Warnings may look a bit scarier than they need to, but the fact is that they only really come into play if someone keeps posting in a manner that sabotages, or derails, or gets overly personal. Certain views aren't allowed here like racism and bigotry, and there are plenty of places on the internet that allow such views.
We're genuinely trying to let conversation happen, but when certain discussion continually get derailed the same way (for a non-politics example, people always complaining about piracy in threads about emulation or port begging in threads about exclusives) it's not doing anyone any good to let those things happen time and time again, I don't think.
Plus, before I was a mod, I myself got warned, and still was offered a position on the moderating team. It's not the black mark on your record that many think. We don't judge people for getting warnings. We judge people for *ignoring* them.
