Then drop it. But seems like you really do want to re-litigate it
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I don’t really need to read these points, because I know first-hand what Jon is like; I was frequently on the receiving end of their abuse. The moderation action absolutely was justified, and frankly well overdue. The perception of an “unfair ban” is entirely that - a perception.
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And the current COC doesn’t cover that basic principal…
Respect each other? Covered.
Maybe we should explicitly call out not discussing politics here, and then we’ll all live in harmony like me and my Uncle.
Seems like this issue is solved then, without the need for additional language.
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No, I made my concerns clear. I don’t care about Jon’s suspension anymore. I care about the zero-tolerance policy.
Please make an effort to read what you’re replying to, before replying. It’s the second time I’m asking you this.
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Good. Respecting other people means not sharing an opinion you know will hurt someone else.
We just discussed politics respectfully, so I don’t know why that has to be explicitly covered. Not all politics are bad and not all political conversations are corrosive; they just frequently end up that way.
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“My stubbornness around recent events in the community have caught up with me and recently received a ban. I’m not innocent, but it’s hard to stay impartial when you’re so invested in a project and community.”
Your idea that Jon doesn’t know what they did wrong is not even supported by themselves.
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@joepie91 Please, read my post carefully. I wasn’t arguing that Jon’s suspension was unfair. That was not my point at all. I said the moderators’ actions were controversial. And they were. This was debated on multiple platforms, including this one.
My point being, if the moderator’s actions weren’t controversial, then the zero-tolerance policy would make a lot of sense. But this is not the case.
Thank you.
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But that’s a problem who decides what is corrosive or not?
And further to that point, who is being corrosive?
Like you’re missing that point.
You don’t even have to worry about it without talking about it. And quite honestly, I’m not sure why this would be the forum to even discuss politics.
There are definitely more appropriate and designated forums to discuss politics. Since here people’s arguments surrounds politics.
And I understand. We want to keep people from being called names being made to feel ashamed about who they are as a person. I’m not sure how that comes up when discussing NixOS, But you definitely eliminate that possibility by banning people who are disrespectful and by removing political topics from the forum.
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The moderators, that’s why they’re moderators.
The people who know their opinions are hurtful to others but still choose to be loud and obnoxious about it.
Me either! But it keeps happening, despite those people being told that they are being hurtful. Why do they continue to be hurtful? That is a great question.
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This seems very reasonable. And almost standard language you’d find in any Enterprise.
I’m guessing the discussions around moderation might be around implementation. Again based on the language I’ve read I can’t see where anyone would disagree.
Edit: It’s odd my post are being flagged and hidden. None of my post are talking about offensive material just making counter points to another poster who’s post are not being hidden. Maybe this is the concern of being silenced that the dissenters are being so loud about.
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Moderator actions are always controversial. That is part of the job of being a moderator - you are necessarily dealing with conflict, and most of the time, at least one person is going to step away from the situation unhappy. The point of good moderation policy is to be deliberate about who this one person is, and preventing the amount of unhappy people from becoming “everyone involved”.
In short: “moderator actions are controversial” is, in and of itself, never an argument for any particular policy, and does not invalidate zero-tolerance policies. Specific concerns can be addressed, but if any appearance of controversy is the extent of your concern, then that is simply not an actionable thing.
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I couldn’t disagree more. Many are completely uncontroversial. The affected person (e.g. spammer, troll, etc) might not like the moderator action, of course, but that’s not what controversy means.
I consider controversy to be what happened with Jon’s suspension: it was one of the major reasons for the big crisis in the community and it was debated vigorously across multiple different social platforms (HN, Lobste.rs, Reddit, Matrix, Discourse, etc – hundreds of comments each), which obviously happened in part because of his previously well-respected status. In contrast, I’ve never seen that happen because a spammer was suspended.
That sounds great but it’s not what your actions show, given how you are ignoring multiple people here who are expressing the same concern, yet in the real-time Matrix channel (which many cannot commit to) multiple decisions were changed immediately when only one single person (in the moderator in-group) expressed a concern, without almost any debate in various occasions.
Please take the concern seriously and don’t attack a straw man. This entire thread started with someone saying that the zero-tolerance policy is too harsh. Various people expressed the same concern and suggested a one-warning policy. This concern and suggestion couldn’t be more actionable.
Don’t change this to be about “you are concerned about moderation controversy”, this is a straw man and you know very well this is not what we are asking – it’s just one justification for the concern, among various others that were given.
I’m sorry, but I feel this is being completely unproductive. I don’t think I will engage this topic anymore, especially if you continue to ignore the issue and keep debating endlessly. I think I have been respectful and have argued in good faith, but I don’t consider that we are being heard. If this behavior continues with the governance discussions (and I am hoping it doesn’t), I will not consider the result to be legitimate.
Thank you.
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That is exactly the definition of controversy: a dispute, especially a public one, between sides holding opposing views. The controversy is between the moderator and the moderated.
Yes this is an example of controversy.
You’ve confused the timeline here, the community was already deep into the crisis at the time Jon was banned.
Yes, not with a spammer, but you have seen that happen with a troll.
Where is the proof of this? This is complete conjecture.
Yes and its been explained that you misread the zero tolerance policy:
So what is the actual issue you have?
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We have contributors from different countries.
- Those who speak Mandarim - a language without the concept of gender or number in its grammar.
- Those who speak German - a language when the grammatical gender does not match the object’s gender.
- Those who speak Brazilian - where gender, number and grade pervades all the syntatic and semantic structures of the language.
Compared to those and many other languages, English is just barbaric.
Requiring everyone to perfectly speak such a language is already elitistic enough for native speakers, let alone for non-native ones.
And this factoring the fact that extra pronouns were invented very recently, your idea of “entire time in speaking the English language” as a very long amount of time is overwhelmingly misleading.
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I’m wondering how this is being flagged? And other post in this thread where I am simply replying to another posters who’s post are not being flagged.
This might be what is causing an uproar. Seems like people are silence for opinions. Not for breaking the CoC.
So anyone can flag any post they disagree with and it gets hidden?
I would say we need a better mechanism than that. This is a perfect example of misusing/abusing the system. We definitely need to safeguard against all abusive/immature behavior.
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For what it’s worth, nobody is going to be hovering over a ban button. Nobodies first response to a report is to reach for the ban button. It’s to try and understand what’s happening and hopefully deescalate and resolve an issue peacefully. I try to make sure that things do follow the principles of restorative justice - to ensure that folks take accountability for their actions and give people a chance to redeem themselves.
The intent here is that if someone who has been unsuspended to participate can’t do so on level ground with others, and doesn’t respond to feedback, then there are clear, well-defined consequences that reflect their history (and the risk of others not wanting to be involved if they are) - while giving them a chance to be involved.
A temporary suspension is “you need a time out for some reason because you haven’t been working effectively with others”.
A ban/unbounded suspension is “you have repeatedly shown that you can’t work well with others”.
That is relatively evenly applying the concept to all. It is also why we have a much clearer code of conduct for those discussions (unlike the overall project), so that we can mutually understand how people are willing to engage with each other.
@dedguy21: The flag system isn’t perfect, but it is also better than always leaving everything visible until someone happens upon it (I only joined the moderation team last night, but if folks overly abuse the flag system that will become a problem).
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Thanks for the reply.
I would say the person who overly uses the flag system last night is already problematic, not becoming problematic, and that there should be language in the CoC that addressing this type of abuse as well. Something to the effect (and my wording won’t be perfect I am not a lawyer just a developer)
“Misusing/abusing the Flag system, where a person is clearly not off topic, or has not broken the CoC, but is being used only to hide opinions you disagree with, is an indication you don’t work well with others, and will lead to a suspension, and repeated behavior will lead to a ban”
I think we can look at my case, whoever flagged me was not doing so in good faith, in fact spitefully so, and clearly had done so because they didn’t like my perspective (and I’m a US liberal Democrat), and it a not so subtle “F* You”
Again I don’t think there should be allowed political discussions on this forum period, it doesn’t serve to make the distro/code any better, and we should only be focusing on NixOS/Nix where we at least know everyone in this forum is here because they are at minimum, enthusiastic about it. But bad behavior definitely should be equally punished. Obviously I don’t know who flagged my comments but I would be interested to know what the consequences are.
We should not allow this type of misbehavior even when we align with the belief of the person who is misbehaving. We aren’t trying to become the angry fascist mob ourselves while trying to defend and protect right of others.
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I’m equally concerned with the fact that people may have also “liked” post by Jon Ringer that were off-topic from NixOS/Nix, politically charged, and ultimately did not serve in the improvement of NixOS/Nix. That was the time to step-up and administer admonishments, at the very least stay challenge to stay on topic. And anyone who might have ‘liked’ these type of post, you added to the current state of the community.
My Uncle said it about BLM, which I think was misapplied, but I’d like to say it here:
“If you don’t want to be over-policed, then do a better job at policing yourselves”
My strong stance is that this could all be avoided by not allowing political discussions of any kind, the topics of discussion should only be NixOS-related and any political discussions be removed whether we’re aligned or not. The term “apolitical” garnered a lot of pushback, so let me offer “politically agnostic”. I think as an opensource community focused on a specific technology we should strive to be as politically agnostic as possible.
For example, if I were to bring up the atrocities in Gaza, while I am deeply moved by the similarities of the US African Americans experience and the Palestinians in Gaza even before the war, I don’t think this specific forum is the appropriate place to bring up this topic, it isn’t making NixOS/Nix any better, and there are other designated, and more appropriate forums for this.
This community should be about our common interest of NixOS/Nix, and anything more I think detracts from this focus.
Again the “Protecting Minorities” stance is an overreaction, but in the case where someone who played a significant role was allowed to spew his “unhelpful to Nix” political views, it is a very understandable overreaction at this point.
As an objective person, which is why I love computers, I think moderating something as subjective as “feelings” is a mistake, unrealistic and will lead to abuse on one end, and more backlash on the other, because of prioritizing one group’s feelings over others.
But we are here today. A result of a person or persons, who played a significant role in this community, bringing up charged political topics. The current apologists should have stepped in then and admonished them, and definitely not “liked” any off-topic post, instead of calls of potential abuse and inequality now.
Look in the mirror, how much of where we are now could have been prevented if we as individuals acted, and now we are suffering the consequences of our inaction. How well did we police ourselves?
Lessons can be learned.
Edit:
@paperdigits I’m not sure if you a trying to purposely misconstrue but in reply:
“I don’t think it is possible for you to be objective on this. “Those who flag me are wrong!” will clearly apply to almost everyone who is getting flagged.”
I can objectively state that my post was neither off-topic or broke CoC, the flag was removed today in fact because I was right in my objection.
“Concerned or have proof? We need proof of such things.”
I don’t have proof, the posts were deleted
“Unfortunately I don’t think that is possible either, too many things are political and they relate to the project. If we can’t discuss here, then there is no place for official community discussion and that is problematic as well.”
We can avoid external politics, erroneously conflating the politics concerning the destiny of NixOS and external politics is insincere.
“I don’t think retroactively blaming (whoever this group of “apologists” are) is productive at this point.”
My point wasn’t blaming, but asking people to look in the mirror.
“Yes, like if you know your opinion is hurtful to others, then just don’t share it out of respect for them.”
Vague statement, what if the opinion concerns the direction of NixOS/Nix? If my opinion in this matter hurts a person’s feelings I should refrain from my opinion.
You are obviously passionate, and maybe it is derailing your objectivity. Avoiding the sharing of opinions external to the project solves a lot of issue.
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I don’t think it is possible for you to be objective on this. “Those who flag me are wrong!” will clearly apply to almost everyone who is getting flagged.
Concerned or have proof? We need proof of such things.
You want to community police but you also want to remove flagging which is the only form of community policing available?
We’ve also already proven that community policing won’t work.
Unfortunately I don’t think that is possible either, too many things are political and they relate to the project. If we can’t discuss here, then there is no place for official community discussion and that is problematic as well.
I don’t think retroactively blaming (whoever this group of “apologists” are) is productive at this point.
Yes, like if you know your opinion is hurtful to others, then just don’t share it out of respect for them.