Hypothetically, now, purely hypothetically, with the kind of prescriptive rules we are operating under the following scenario becomes viable:
Hypothesize, if you will, a small group of people interested in chaos rather than debate. This group can engage in baiting behavior, spending perhaps 5 minutes a day dashing off standard fare they've used before, or are lifting from other forums. This dashed off material is designed to lure the opposition in to spending substantially more time replying to the bait, as well as to be irritating to the other side. In addition, this material is designed to comply with prescriptive rules, perhaps, for example, it lacks cursing and personal insults, but speaks airily of "general groups" leaving the obvious targets unmentioned.
This costs the baiters essentially nothing, and since they have no real skin in the game, they can do it more or less forever without ever violating one of the prescriptions. Remember, these hypothetical entities simply don't care, they have no emotional involvement, and anyways they're writing at most a handful of words a day. It is therefore easy for them to police their own efforts to remain within the envelope of whatever the forum's prescriptions are.
By keeping the opposition busy and irritated, and by eliciting much lengthier and detailed responses from the opposition, they essentially guarantee that, eventually, each member of the opposition will, in a fit of irritation, break one of the forum prescriptions. This is, hypothetically, the actual goal of the game. This is the victory condition of this mythical game I am sketching out here, in an exercise of the imagination.
Moderation, therefore, gets applied almost exclusively to people who are actually trying to discuss things. Hypothetically.
Eventually, everyone except the baiters leaves.
Then the forum has several options available, it can lie fallow. It can close up shop. It can pivot to serving a fringe audience, like godlike.com, and evidently there's good money to be made there. So, that could be good.