We deleted the personal attacks and temp locked the thread. I'm not sure what else we could have done.
The thing about deep thoughts is ultimately while we can delete the poorer posts we cannot force people to post interesting or inciteful content and so ultimately it is only as good as the community makes it.
I do think the sub has gradually improved- 6 months ago it was full of Autism, Circumcision and Nigger threads. Those kind of threads are no longer common and there have been a few interesting threads recently- the lost N Korea thread, a forum culture thread and the hoarding thread spring to mind.
The shallow thoughts bans seem to really rile people up, but I think to get one you have to push fairly hard- me and val can't issue them so your posts have to attract the attention of the purples or greens. Why people get so annoyed at having their shitposting limited is vaguely baffling and slightly embarrassing.
EN has improved much more largely because it is more reliant on outside stories than user generated content.