If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.