A statement from members of the moderation team

Announcements
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As a member of the community I demand full transparency from the SC (@Ericson2314 @Gabriella439 @jtojnar @roberth @tomberek @winter) regarding the removal and addition of moderation team members. This includes all related discussions, decisions, voting results and the timeline of events of the last term.

Robert mentioned that “more openness is needed”. John “agreed with everything Robert said”. Gabriella has asked for public disclosure of voting results earlier.

That’s 3/6 SC members already. I am sure that SC will be able to get one more vote for a majority decision to make this information public.

Please do so with urgency.

This mostly refers to John and Robert, because all other members of the SC have expiring terms or are stepping down anyway.

Robert has justified him not stepping down with:

  • the negative effect on staggered elections, and
  • the belief to be able to still represent the community.

John has “agreed with everything Robert said”.

Luckily, the NCA has given us the tools to handle this exceptionally well. The constitution reads:

Full Reelections

A simple majority within the SC may call a reelection of the entire SC based on perceived loss of confidence. In this case, it also has to be decided whether this election is considered a special election for the remainders of all the corresponding terms, or an initial election for full 2-year terms for half of the seats rounded up and 1-year half-terms for the remaining seats.

A full reelection will allow us to both confirm that John and Robert still represent the community and keep the elections staggered in the future.

A full reelection is a win-win for everyone:

  • If reelected, it confirms John’s and Robert’s opinion on how to handle moderation, and clearly shows that the community shares this stance and supports it.
  • If not reelected, it allows John and Robert to reflect on their perception of the community’s needs and how they handled the situation. It allows the community to elect members it trusts.

Personally, I can only imagine two reasons for not doing this:

  • If John and Robert want to hold onto their power as SC, despite expecting that they might have lost the community’s trust. I seriously don’t think this is the case.
  • If John and Robert don’t want to appear as admitting failure in handling this situation.

I doubt that anyone in the community would see admitting failure as a bad thing - on the contrary. Calling for a full reelection requires a lot of courage, and the community would applaud the SC for making that decision.

John and Robert have both stepped up for election to the SC in the community’s darkest times. They have been part of numerous very controversial decisions in the past couple of weeks. They have shown this courage over and over again. I am sincerely hoping, they will do so once more.

As a member of this community, I ask the SC (@Ericson2314 @Gabriella439 @jtojnar @roberth @tomberek @winter) to make the following decisions:

  1. Call for an immediate full reelection.
  2. Declare this reelection as an “initial election”.
  3. Extend the deadline for nominations of the currently ongoing election to allow enough time for John and Robert to be nominated and endorsed again.

These decisions must be taken immediately, due to the ongoing election.

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I fully agree. It’s frustrating to operate in the blind here, and it makes all of this feel futile.

As much of a powerful statement as it is for an entire team to resign, without the actual details, it’s impossible for me to make any truly meaningful conclusion. I imagine the same goes for many other members of the community, that can’t keep tabs on all the rumors floating around about what really happened.

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Slow mode be slow, so a lot of replies in one post because I have to. Also, will try not to repeat anything that’s been said by others already.

As mentioned already, this is exactly the fundamental misunderstanding at play here. If the code of conduct were a complete, unambiguous set of rules, that can be applied objectively to any individual action to identify whether that action is Good or Bad, we wouldn’t need moderation - we could just make a bot that does it. The reason we need human moderators is because in practice, the lines are fuzzy, and “objective” moderation does not work (see “On a technicality”, a writeup I’ve linked many times in our conversations with SC). This is also why alignment and trust between project leadership and the moderation team, and between moderation team members is essential - unlike the SC, moderation can’t say “we need two business days to reconvene and decide on a course of action” and then debate on which exact rule was or wasn’t violated. The action often needs to happen in the moment, and for that to happen, we need to trust and be trusted to make the right call for the health of the community.

I’d like to know what you consider “not being accountable” here. My experience with the moderation team to SC communication has been that while the conversations have often been tense, there was never a point where the SC explicitly made a demand from moderation and that demand was not followed, until recently.

I’m happy to answer more questions as long as they aren’t related to individual decisions, though due to slow mode, it might be better to do this in DMs or on Matrix. This applies to everyone, by the way, and if anyone takes me up on that, I hereby commit to allowing my responses to be published.

The constitution does not really provide a way for the board or the SC to directly counterplay each other. They are expected to cooperate, but there’s currently no mechanism in place for what happens when they can’t or don’t.

The fact that the comparisons are made between moderation and police is, to me, very telling. We’re paramedics, not cops.

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My 2 cents, as a community member that actively tries to avoid discussing anything unrelated to how Nix helps solve me real problems:

whatever happens in this dispute, I think we need to separate technology from community more clearly.

Contributing code and participating in community spaces are not the same thing, yet right now behavior on Discord or Matrix can determine whether someone is allowed to contribute. That gives community discussions far too much influence over the technical side of the project.

Moderation policies should focus on keeping discussions constructive. But decisions about who can or cannot contribute code should be handled through a separate, accountable process. Otherwise, we risk losing contributors and getting stuck in governance drama instead of building the technology. Maybe the SC could focus on establishing this process and let the moderation continue its work.

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I just want my software to work. This sort of thing has the potential to get in the way of that. I look forward to this being remedied.

And now for an analysis no one asked for:

I personally admire some people on the SC and how they’ve conducted themselves and the SC decisions I’ve seen so far, as well as the idealism they carry in their purpose. However that seems to have clashed with moderation’s culture.

From a cursory overview, blissfully unburdened of knowing any of the drama behind these events: it appears this has exposes two competing theories of moderation (or: the framework within a ‘use of force’ is to be exercised).

  • One, let’s call it “private”, is very pragmatic: seeking outcomes and limiting information. I’d imagine they would prefer to obscure the precise reasons for decisions (e.g. not quoting an infringing post in public view), and not be obliged to follow strict legalese when enforcing (values spirit > word). They go by “vibes” in an attempt to minimize friction and reduce the amount of tinder sparks threaten to ignite. This allows a great deal of flexibility, but also requires a great deal of care as it can be prone to abuse.

  • The other, let’s call it “public”, is very idealistic: seeking purity of process and trying to justify its actions in the eyes of the people. Verbose public records, consent-based ‘policing’, accountability to the people. This correctly identifies the source of the authority (ultimately coming from the users) and tries to legitimize itself by acknowledging that in a meaningful way. This requires a more rigorous approach and comes with much friction and internal debate, and welcomes public criticism by design, which it seeks to address and improve itself by.

The “Private” theory is more often followed in enterprise; just read any EULA, or try to inquire the reasons for a ban, and you’ll see it in action. The “Public” theory is more often used where the stakes are higher, such as law enforcement, the legal system and its courts, and government accountability: all systems where the ‘force’ it ultimately relies upon is true violence, and the stakes are life-and-limb.

Private is easier. Public demands great efforts and can be an order of magnitude more burdensome. When used properly, both can achieve peace. But of course, this is a spectrum and neither position is absolute nor appropriate in every situation.

However, there’s a NOP solution. Eliminate (or reduce) the need for use of force. This is just a community. While there are benefits to having an official one, it isn’t required for the success of Nix and its ecosystems. If it continues to be a source of drama or can’t be managed effectively: just get rid of it. In a way, abdicate responsibility and let the community figure itself out with a bunch of unofficial lemmy instances or whatever it pleases. Moderation would only be needed for things like GH, which are more constrained in focus and objective (and easier than general forum).

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I’m honestly puzzled. If things escalate to the point that a person is banned from discussions on (say) discourse, you expect that their discussions on pull requests with the same group of people will be just fine?

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I can’t agree more.

If moderation is such a burden and so contentious, maybe it should not be there an official forum in the first place.

I like having somewhere to ask for help and learn from others, but I get really uneasy with all the tension when threads related to the projects politics arise.

People should get along better and move away from those battles that do not help the project and the community. I wish all the best to the moderators on their future endeavors.

Cheers

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Thank you all for the work you’ve done in keeping the official spaces running, it’s not an enviable position and I don’t think volunteer moderators get enough thanks for the work they do.

I do wish there was more information from both sides as to what actually happened, since right now all we have are vague at best accusations. Especially with the (now expanded) SC election coming up, this feels like an important issue which shouldn’t have this amount of ambiguity surrounding it.

If these accounts are accurate, then it’s deeply troubling. Even if there isn’t a strict limit/balance on how much authority the SC has over the Moderation team, anyone should be able to see that this behaviour is unacceptable if the Moderation team is expected to effectively fulfill their role. Again, with the SC election coming up, these aren’t claims that should be left unsubstantiated.

And if this is accurate, then it raises a separate (but still relevant) issue of moderation practices. And again, I’d like to see these claims substantiated rather than just left vague. (To make an implied assertion,) If moderators made such erroneous moderating decisions based on personal opinions, or refused to cooperate with the SC to such an extent that it warranted removing said moderators, surely there should be some insight as to what exactly happened that can be shared with the community.

Between this and the recent Anduril employment controversy, the SC is losing a lot of goodwill. I’ll agree with others that have posted above in that this is the first year of the SC’s existence and there will be mistakes and growing pains, but these last few incidents have seemed like procedural blunders that shouldn’t have gone as far as they did. It shouldn’t be this hard to provide clarity and accountability, yet it seems like the community has to constantly claw and poke for answers.

I do hope that we can turn this moment into actionable improvements, because whatever this ambiguous status-quo has become is clearly not working.

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FWIW, moderators cannot remove their own positions, only admins can. Only @lassulus from moderation team has admin privileges, and he is not resigning as of now.

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Moderation permissions have been revoked earlier today, what you are linking to is a rather meaningless group with no extra permissions.

https://discourse.nixos.org/about

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Far too much discourse about the moderators themselves and almost none about what they actually alleged.

If what the strikers have claimed is true, you’ve been interfering with their team and demanding they target specific individuals/threads the SC does not like. Recently, a member of the SC has developed conflicts of interests that were not made widely known until pointed out by the community in a thread the other week.

Also, the founder (!) of the company the SC member works for recently directly commented about the members of the community who do not want corporate conflicts of interests, calling us “fringe” https://archive.md/sWbsY. It’s clear the higher ups at Anduril know about the direct control they have in the SC!

Until things are properly cleared up and claims are addressed its not unreasonable to make connections about these things. Please clear this up for us :frowning:

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Thank you very much for bringing this up.

This kind of direct confirmation from Anduril loses them plausible and implausible deniability. They do want to exert control over community, and everyone suggesting otherwise is factually wrong. And we can infer that Tom, at least now, knows full well what he signed up for.

Everyone who gives any kind of ground to Anduril, including but not limited to giving them the benefit of the doubt, is complicit in this military overtake of community.

Including the 6 SC members who chose to hide Tom’s employment status.

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Ok, I’m done — I usually keep away from things like this, because I’m not a perfectly spherical leftist in a vacuum and as such didn’t quite agree with how moderation team worked, that all disagreement is inherently sealioning or that defence companies should’ve been a priori excluded from supporting the project and I don’t really enjoy arguing that “no, not supporting certain policies 100% does not mean I’m some kind of *ist”. But this feels like enough of a do or die that I would probably forever regret had I not said anything.

So.

Having not known what exactly transpired in the background, I would’ve probably put some stock in the moderation team not being objective and transparent enough, which is congruent with the impression of their modus operandi I have witnessed from the outside. I understand that it is sometimes desirable no to disclose certain facts to avoid backlash or harassment, but being judicious about disclosure is something different than having to trust into a process that appears rather “vibe based”. Let’s say that’s bias disclosure — I’m more likely to be biased against the moderation team, than against the SC.

But even assuming that would have been true, ElvishJerrico made a great point that SC appears to have chosen a wrong instrument of disagreeing — instead of building systems that facilitate processes they think are more conducive to “objective moderation”, they seem to have corroborated trying to push against the moderator team directly. Which indeed feels less like a Steering Committee and more like Executive Committee which is not what people voted for.

And the “UNO reverse” about accountability KFearsoff made in their hidden post — while maybe a bit too aggressive — was also on point. If SC is complaining about public accountability of the moderator team, they should also hold themselves to a similarly high standard of accountability, which seems to have been lacking as well, as can be inferred from recent resignation posts and replies in this thread.

And then there’s this kicker mentioned just above: Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey): "The bias goes way beyond online spats. The good news is that Anduril will keep using Nix to build ever more powerful weapons for American dominance regardless of what the fringe "community" people say." | XCancel

Here’s a few choice quotes:

I really hope the nix community can recover from this infiltration of nut jobs and their nonsense

Maybe @PalmerLuckey can help turn the ship around

That’s retarded. Anduril should have been CELEBRATED for supporting nix! And I think it still could be, if @PalmerLuckey and others with a stake in this technology decides to get these nut jobs out.

Anduril will keep using Nix to build ever more powerful weapons for American dominance

Look, I don’t necessarily agree with the way the moderators worked, but I don’t really doubt it was at least an honest expression of their beliefs. Not a trojan horse of soon-to-be-Gilead hegemony. I don’t mind weapons used for defence against those who wish you harm. I mind them, when an off-the-rails buffoon whips their whole country into a chauvinistic frenzy, renaming DoD into a Department of War. And when this buffoon keels over, there’s another in line, with backing of corpofeudalists like Thiel.

So, yeah. I’m not too fond of using the “nazi bar” analogy left and right, but if fascist-adjacent people talk about taking over NixOS and setting it right, then the proverbial nazis certainly got a wee bit too comfortable in the bar. How about no?

NixOS is an European project, and the NixOS Foundation was (and hopefully still be) an European entity. I want it to remain an European project and be a cornerstone of European technological self-sovereignty (kind of staking my NLNet grant application on it xD). As such, I think we should ideally get this house in order and not let it fall under the hegemony of the richest third world country. And if that fails, just cut the losses and build something saner without them.

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A few more responses for the pile.

(this I was actually writing yesterday but lost in the edits)

The important conversations are the ones that concern the direction of the project. Obviously we don’t need to get into fights over, like, favorite sports teams or whatever, but there are hard conversations that we should be having - like this one.

A few good points were already brought up against this, but I’ll add another one: as soon as you remove official discussion spaces, what happens is that people go to unofficial spaces instead, and those spaces become the community, and the policies in those communities become the community policy. This in most cases just leads to an even bigger mess, as multiple subcommunities with conflicting ideals clash publicly.

Just to respond to this entire post, really - the reason moderation decisions are kept private are to protect the safety of those involved. People reporting issues should not have to drag themselves through the court of public opinion, possibly for months on end.

Once again, my DMs are open, if you have specific questions. However, I’d still prefer not to share any identifying details, which understandably makes things hard, but the last thing I want is to put the people affected in the line of fire even more.

Also, I’d like to remind everyone of the initial policy declared by the SC towards the moderation team, specifically the last two points - this was what we initially agreed on, and it has never changed.

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The moderation team mentions that a team member was removed by the SC.

The SC has not denied this statement, so far, however, they framed it as a “proposal”.

The SC has publicly expressed their intent not to:

intervene significantly in the Moderation Team’s affairs except in cases of significant malfeasance, misconduct, or dereliction of duty.

Could the SC (@Ericson2314 @Gabriella439 @jtojnar @roberth @tomberek @winter) please clarify what happened here?

  • Who has been (proposed to be) removed from the moderation team?
  • Was this indeed a proposal and would the moderation team have been free to reject it?
  • If yes: How was this “proposal” communicated towards the moderation team?
  • If no: Which “malfeasance, misconduct, or dereliction of duty” has caused this?

The moderation team mentions that the SC first proposed, then forcefully appointed a new member of the moderation team.

The SC has publicly stated that:

Future additions to the Moderation Team must be approved by the Steering Committee (by majority vote)

(emphasis mine)

Frankly, and “approval” can only happen if there is a proposal by somebody else.

Could the SC (@Ericson2314 @Gabriella439 @jtojnar @roberth @tomberek @winter) please clarify what happened here?

  • Who has been proposed and later appointed as a new member of the moderation team?
  • Why has the SC decided to deviate from the agreed procedures?

It is entirely unacceptable to stay silent on either of this.

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This is a reasonable approach and how NixOS been operating historically, but it’s not obvious that this is the best way to this. For example, when the Rust moderation team resigned, the resignation letter wasn’t posted to users.rust-lang.org or internals.rust-lang.org. It was a PR against a repository that holds governance information for the Rust project, which was quickly merged and locked. The actual discussion that mattered occurred in Zulip, where a private channel was created with leads of all rust teams. That is, it was a discussion within rust governance, which informed, but didn’t really invite the rest of the community to participate.

The community got the chance to discuss things on r/rust, a well-regarded, but unofficial space, but there were zero expectations that that discussion is setting direction of the project.

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Less the reporter and more the subject, but: Yes, I understand and agree. That’s also a benefit of the private way which obscures the specifics by default, where as a public oriented system would be more based on selective redactions which need to be justified (which seems to be what some have called for here). As I mentioned, this would create a potential spectacle of every action, partly why private “reduce[s] the amount of tinder sparks threaten to ignite.”

My remark about being ‘unburdened’ is because I have no idea; I don’t keep up with this community or the rumors or mod actions (which are opaque at a glance; which again, is fine if they broadly have community trust). I just daily-drive NixOS as a regular user and hobby dev 'cuz “I want my software to work.” The private theory fits better for a forum like this imo which is why it’s more often used in enterprise. The Nix Discourse isn’t a grand exchange of ideas and debate: it’s a forum oriented around a software ecosystem. It hardly requires the rigor of a public system. The only reason people would want that is if they’ve lost trust in the mod team, wanted more spectacle, or if they’re pursuing an improved “purity of process” for idealistic reasons.

At a glance, it appears that the SC is trying to improve Mod credibility by providing a form of public oversight: to use a private theory externally for its benefits, but lean towards public internally (e.g. have the quote snippets and extensive mod details and justifications, but don’t publish them). This is quite common practice… Further, SC seems to have wanted “friction” e.g. self-criticism. This may be out of legitimate concern with a case in mind, or in pursuit of general improvement / as a safety.

But of course, that’s at a glance. A slightly deeper read implies there’s a lot more going on here, with how the mod team is resisting these measures and their complaints about interacting with SC. It seems there needs to be a more formal channel for communication between the two, and some expectations / groundrules need to be set. This isn’t usually needed for teams of this size, but … perhaps we Nix users are a little predisposed to certain things. The fact that things have gotten to this point alone, in addition to the “proposal vs. demand” claims, means there has been a serious communication breakdown between the parties, on top of whatever issues fuel the underlying friction.

With all that said…

This is of greater concern… And due to the opaque nature of using a private model, things like this thrive (more easily). My only interest here is that “my software works”, and this, like the drama, can threaten that because

Any overt support for military projects will surely push very talented people away. There’s nothing Nix can do to prevent its use in such environments: it’s merely a tool, and tools will be used. But alignment with such efforts would be detrimental to Nix. Dropping Anduril as a sponsor was wise. But…

It’s unclear if this is relevant. While Anduril’s desire to exert influence over Nix is (imo) undeniable, I’m not yet convinced that this issue should be seen as a proxy war between Anti/Pro Anduril factions. However, with the lack of transparency and previous controversies, I can understand why some would have come to that conclusion. It really depends on what we don’t know: e.g. if SC was targeting individuals in an effort to push an agenda, or if this is just an epic communications breakdown. Who made those calls; who suggested what, and what was their reasoning. I doubt we’ll ever know.

Perhaps the eligible voting members should be voting on more than just representation?

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