Moderation Team Accountability Issues

Meta Moderation
52

A misunderstanding. I have no enthusiasm for authoritarianism. What I have is an allergy to people criticizing authoritarianism without offering an alternative other than authoritarianism run by people who agree more with them.

I also, admittedly, don’t think that authoritarian online communities are nearly as bad as authoritarian governments in the real world. The vast majority of online fora are governed by authoritarian power structures (i.e., they have moderators and those moderators make and enforce the rules per their own beliefs) and much of the time that is good enough. The worst case scenarios are wildly divergent—in one, abuse of authority can lead to confiscation, imprisonment, death; in the other, abuse of authority is pretty much limited to not having your words published by someone else’s server.

If nobody will propose and succeed at implementing an alternative to authoritarianism, the only thing to do is operate with an understanding of the way authoritarianism works, or decline to participate. That’s not enthusiasm; that’s realism.

7 Likes
53

That’s a relief.

I actually agree. But what if the authoritarian leadership takes on a radical opinion that willfully excludes productive members of the community? Do we just stand by and watch as they justify everything under the paradox of tolerance? What about the paradox of the oppressed? What the hell is so offensive about steak anyway, cause I’m still not getting it.

It is one thing if there is an authoritarian BDFL who is actually primarily concerned with the health of the community and the project, but what if the leadership puts personal political motivations above the good of the community? We can’t even point it out or dare to disagree without risking a ban? Seems destructive and wasteful to me.

2 Likes
54

What if the leader of a technical project takes a direction that you don’t agree with?

  • Reach out to them about it.
  • Try to be civil and reasonable.
  • Present your point of view concretely; avoid starting from abstract principles that may mean different things to you and the leader.
  • Respect that the leader may not want to discuss the decision.
  • Decide for yourself, based on what the leader does, whether the outcome is something you can work with.

It would be nice if the mods would offer some sort of statement to the effect of, ‘Except in cases of extreme provocation, we won’t issue any bans without giving the subject notice and a chance to make things right first.’ That seems consistent with the way they’ve been operating so far. Would that alleviate this concern?

(You probably don’t like it, but if making a commitment like this I think the mods should have an ‘except in cases’ escape clause, not to silence civil dissent but to stop the troll who drops in and starts spraying invective and slurs everywhere—‘we’ll give you a day to edit your posts’ is not really an appropriate response to that guy, nor is playing whack-a-mole with the individual posts as they come in fast and furious.)

3 Likes
56

Apparently you are pointing it out and aren’t banned yet. Notice anything?

57

Of course, if one reads it, one should be careful to make sure to separate direct observations from implications and guesses, as the latter are likely to be wrong (intransparency of some things is real), and some are indeed wrong (I don’t think being more specific will convince anyone, and I’d risk divulging information that became clear from private communication).

Yeah, Nixpkgs has been there believed that, the story ended up with some people setting up social pressure to talk the leader into a commitment to either discussing or fully delegating, and then this has been used to push through some changes the leader initially opposed but didn’t want to discuss in detail.

1 Like
58

Right, but if the mods ask people to change their profile picture then that should follow from some rule the community has agreed on. The current situation appears to be that the mods and Srid disagreed on a topic that is not relevant to NixOS, and the mods thought they’d enforce their opinion by being “the mods”. I.e the request to change profile image and a background image would make sense if NixOS were an organization joining e.g vegans, but it has no relation to that.

2 Likes
59

My understanding is that a rules-first approach to moderation was tried via an RFC, agreement couldn’t be reached, so instead we have a moderation team that makes decisions based on their best judgment. As has been stated ad nauseam, if an RFC ever manages to establish rules that the community agrees on, the moderation team agrees to abide by them. Until and unless that happens, it’s completely absurd to say that the mod team can only ask people to do things based on the empty set of rules the community has agreed on.

Have you, or anyone else with this concern about what appears to be, reached out to the mods in any of the channels they have specified for raising concerns—as opposed to trying to start a public mud fight—and simply asked why the mods asked Srid to remove his cover image?

3 Likes
60

Is there any place we could see basis for the “best judgement”, because at least two of the requested items don’t seem to relate to NixOS (so what is “best” about this judgement?). But arguing over off-topic things should, yes, be done elsewhere (wasn’t that complied with?).

(I guess you can tag the moderators again if you are afraid they are not reading this, but I’d assume they are seeing the topic discussed here and elsewhere.)

61

@rhendric

I think your post needs a little response. Anyone reading this should in advance know that I myself DO NOT agree that your description is accurate though. I think, as far as I am concerned, the moderation team did a reasonably good job so far. And it is a difficult job too. But I think, if intended as a defense of the moderation team in place, you really did the opposite here.

He [meaning Srid] was suspended for not doing what mods asked him to do.

If that were really true, I think the whole team should resign. NixOS is too big to have that kind of arbitrary basis for decision making without any kind of guidelines for what to expect in advance. It creates uncertainty beyond belief. Unless of course NixOS adopts such a model explicitly, like a benevolent dictator governance model. But part of the Code of Conduct movement is to tame the Torvaldses of this world. So it seems a bit of an odd move to make at this point.

But even then, in every case of authority there is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate use of it. Benevolent dictators for life are assumed to be benevolent for a reason. If that distinction isn’t made, nobody needs a Code of Conduct that is supposedly there to clarify the very basis of moderator conduct.

So my point in asking my question obviously was: on which legitimate ground was Srid suspended?

Notice here that in order for authorities to be accountable at all, the debate about what constitutes legitimate grounds for their actions needs to be done by those affected by those actions. Not by the authorities. So once such a debate gets shut down, you kinda know in which world you are living.

So when you ask someone to change behavior from an authoritative position, there still needs to be some reasonable ground for that other than the authoritative position itself. This is the deeper reason for why I said that I intellectually fail to grasp the decision.

the suspension happened after Srid said that he’d only obey the mods if they did something he wanted (i.e., turn the things he was being asked to do into universal rules that they would prosecute against everyone equally).

Taking into account what I just said I would go on like this this: that demand appears to be very reasonable. Any authority that is legitimate can produce an account of the reasons of its decision. Part of this account will be universal rules, part why the particular falls under one of the universal rules. The rules also need to apply equally to all cases, which is obvious from their being universal. In western legal systems it is often required from judges to produce an account of their decision in writing.

And since we are all reasonable people here, and since there is a procedure in place for reasonable people to hold the authorities accountable, asking for the reasons backing up a decision by the authorities is quite reasonable too. Otherwise the procedure would be void. And no accountability could ever be had.

My baseline is this: The giving of reasons cannot be be avoided by the authorities.

I think what Srid was demanding here, according to your own account of the matter, is basically fairness in moderation. No more.

If you think you are willing to put up with authoritarian governance but think that the authorities made the wrong call in suspending Srid after he failed to comply with their requests, I say you don’t understand authoritarian governance.

Well, not if the request was illegitimate. That is my point in a way. And I do understand authoritarian government. My extended point is there is no reason to ever create one if you can avoid it. Or, if you have one, to get rid of it. Unless you are the one calling the shots of course.

And if you think that the authorities should not have asked Srid what they did, at last there is a concrete topic of conversation that I think might be productive. It’s not about what he was suspended for.

You could also say it might be an overreach in the competence granted to them. And in a way Srid himself pointed to this by asking: on the grounds of which rule are you making this request?

The two questions are not independent as you seem to assume. Because if they never had the competence to ask him to do something, then suspending him on the basis of non-compliance with the request is baseless. So the illegitimacy of the request entails logically the illegitimacy of the suspension if the suspension was due to non-compliance and not something else entirely.

I also believe that the reasons for suspension, as for any decision, are always very concrete, even though they include universal rules.

It’s about your politics not agreeing with the mods’ politics on this specific issue

  1. First of all that directly contradicts the assumption that “being respectful of differing viewpoints” should be how we guide our conduct thanks to the newly adopted Code of Conduct. That is a fairly obvious point that Srid himself has made on his blog.

  2. One of Srid’s quite contentious points on his blog is that “the core team has deliberately instituted a woke echo-chamber”. Are you actually agreeing with this? Because you sound like him a little bit. I personally don’t agree with this btw,. But your description is somewhat striking.

  3. I don’t think you make a great case against “‘keeping politics out of tech’ or any such nonsense”. In fact, as I see it, letting general politics enter tech has led to this result. Meaning the suspension of Srid, who is a really technically competent guy, much more so than I am. I don’t think the result is good. Had both sides kept politics out of tech the result would have been better. It would never had created the contentious issue in the first place. And his competence would have been preserved as part of this community.

Because of this, I would call for depoliticization on all sides inside tech communities in order to put technical questions center stage and protect people’s time. That decision is of course a political one with respect to the governance of tech communities. But since you accept the authoritarian implementation of such decisions so nicely, I see no grounds for you to object to it once it is made.

  1. It is somewhat strange that when trying to elaborate on your authoritarian model of governance you give the example of a technical team leader. Does the moderation team look like being concerned with technical questions to you? It doesn’t to me. None of the issues in the Code of Conduct concerns how I format my nix code, or how to name a PR on GitHub or any technical issue really. Your example appears to be misleading.

If you agree that moderators should exist and do something that makes them different from other members of a community, it therefore follows that you should expect those moderators to occasionally ask people to do things that those people don’t agree with, and that those people should comply or face the consequences.

Ironically, after all of this disagreement, I totally agree with you here. But this isn’t actually authoritarian at all. It is just authority and equally applies to legitimate and illegitimate use of it. Whether it is legitimate however depends on whether there is an account available to judge the adequacy of the decisions taken, and whether the decision is open for revision if found lacking by a sufficient number of people affected by it.

I expect that if people are asked to do certain things that are not technical questions in which the technical leader can be assumed to have superior technical insight, that there is a reason readily available, from the one doing the asking. This reason explains and limits the competence of authorities asking such things. And otherwise I expect that people are not being asked such things.

On all the lengthy disagreement with you that I voiced here, that is the main point it appears. I expect non-technical authority to not transgress the bounds of intelligible legitimacy.

I’m not talking about what ought to be. I’m simply describing what is.

If that is the case, will you join the revolution if there is going to be one? Because what you are describing is basically an account of illegitimate authority.

Just for the record: I don’t think this description actually matches reality. From all that I have seen the moderation team really has a hard role to fulfill because on some topics the opinions move far apart so someone is going to be dissatisfied either way and you cannot please everyone. And these discussions are actually quite hard and emotionally stressful and all of that.

But it is striking that you come up with this kind of explanation once someones asks what are the reasonable grounds for a certain decision. Remember that people sold the Code of Conduct to me in the other discussion by saying: it makes things explicit, implicit power structures are bad, they only serve those who are already in power etc. etc. … well if your reasoning stands, the explicit power structures might do the same, just on a bigger scale. So they are actually worse.

it’s completely absurd to say that the mod team can only ask people to do things based on the empty set of rules the community has agreed on.

But thanks to the moderation team itself, the set of rules is no longer empty. It is written down in the Code of Conduct. Which, people told me, is an exact or at least close-enough account making explicit what has been implicit practice of moderation so far. So it appears very reasonable indeed to take this document and make it the baseline standard of accountability.

don’t think that authoritarian online communities are nearly as bad as authoritarian governments in the real world.

I have a feeling with the recent politicization of society at large, that has changed a bit. Of course in online communities you can always just leave. But if it gets worse, the abuse of authority can do substantially more damage in online communities than “not having your words published”. The overall culture has deteriorated to such a point that the damage, I feel, is potentially much greater now than it was back in, say, 2015 or so.

What I have is an allergy to people criticizing authoritarianism without offering an alternative

I hope my alternative is clear: Use the general rules readily available now (Code of Conduct) to make sure authorities actually are guided by them and can ground their decision in them. And make sure to put pressure on them when decisions go against the rules or a not readily grounded in them.

2 Likes
62

The job of the moderators is to ensure a safe community, not to enforce things “related to NixOS specifically”, so I don’t understand where this question comes from.

More broadly: something that seems to be getting lost in the discussion here is that community management is a specialization. It is a skill, and one that is particularly difficult to learn. If you are not an experienced community moderator (and merely “having a mod flag” doesn’t qualify for that), then you are almost certainly going to see moderation decisions that you do not understand, because they are the result of years of expertise and learning about behavioural patterns, something that people don’t typically do outside of community management jobs.

Now of course it’s understandable to want to understand how a certain moderation decision was arrived at, and it’s certainly possible for moderators to make mistakes - they are people and therefore fallible like everyone else. Having an inquiring conversation about moderation rationales is thus reasonable.

However. It is not reasonable to assume by default that if you, personally, do not understand a moderation decision, then it must be wrong unless proven otherwise. You wouldn’t assume a carpenter to be wrong just because you don’t understand their techniques; so why would you do that with a moderator?

And yet, that is what very often happens, and it is what happens here too. People could privately reach out to moderators, and ask them to explain the moderation decision, and that would be fine. But aggressively demanding explanations while implying that it must be an invalid ban because you don’t personally see the reason is something entirely different, and very much out of line.

Part of this expertise of community management also means realizing that a “legalistic approach” to moderation (“it’s only bannable if it’s in the rules”) does not work, for the simple reason that moderation fundamentally involves dealing with bad-faith users at times. That doesn’t mean that all moderation is against bad-faith users, but some of it always will be. And bad-faith users will rule-lawyer, because their goal is to find a way to be an asshole that Technically Complies with the rules, but violates their spirit.

In other words: a moderation team that strictly implements a set of community rules (whether you call them “rules”, “code of conduct”, or anything else) just cannot do their job. This is where the subjective judgment of moderators comes into the picture; their job is to keep the community safe, not to enforce rules. If something is creating an unsafe environment, then it is their job to do something about that, regardless of what the rules say.

6 Likes
63

Right, but although I have been on Srid’s homepage (link to which was requested to be removed), I don’t remember there being anything forbidden there; but also I don’t remember what actually was there because the content wasn’t of interest to me. I.e can’t people just not read content they are not interested in? And also not go to a profile where they find an image they don’t agree with, etc? (Although I guess for those who are compulsed to read stuff they don’t need are also compulsed to report it to the mods and that’s why this outcome?)

Seems to me that NixOS mods banned Srid due to an unrelated topic to NixOS itself and then abused their power to enforce their opinion. I say this in context that all evidence of the “behavior” Srid should have changed has been removed, the three requests do seem weird though.

2 Likes
65

To be fair, this is not the evolving subject of this thread. As it neither is a personal attack on moderators, nor any questioning of sanity of character.

The majority of this thread tries to seek a better answer to the question: how can we trust each other and find this community a happy place?

Being borderline subject to abuse of authority (we haven’t established that yet as a shared truth, so this is my own conviction about what happened to Srid, as it happemd to me 2 years ago) is not a good place to start answering that question.

2 Likes
69

Yes, this is a computer software message board. And other places are a supermarket, or a bar. Or a forum about motorcycles. None of those are nominally about our identities. Yet all of those are also communities, where we have to deal with constant harassment and, at times, threats - because the people doing the harassing are not constrained by the nominal topic of these communities either. And that means that community safety is always a concern, regardless of what is nominally the topic of the space.

To try and illustrate it with an analogy: if I’m in a cafe, and someone knocks me out because they think I “look too gay”, then saying “but this is a cafe, this is not about being gay!” is in no way going to undo or prevent that violence, or its consequences. That it’s a cafe and what that cafe is “about”, are not relevant to the community safety aspect - we have to deal with the abuse either way.

If “harassment is everywhere regardless of the type of venue and needs to be dealt with accordingly” is not a thing you are aware of, then I would suggest that you have some work to do in understanding how systemic discrimination and privilege affect different people’s lives differently.

And again, where is the evidence, is there something on the homepage?

To put it bluntly: we are under no obligation to provide an extensive crash course in “this is how we get harassed on a daily basis and how it relates to this one specific post or person” to any random person who asks. This is demanding from us to do extra work on top of already having to deal with the abuse and systemic discrimination issues.

If you are genuinely interested in understanding the problem, then you will have to do work yourself to understand the situation. If you do not wish to do that, then let specialists (eg. community moderators) do that job, and trust the outcome. Don’t make it the problem of already-overburdened marginalized folks.

8 Likes
71

This thread is unlisted and closed now. It is not on topic on our forum to talk about general political disagreements about free-speech vs moderation, or authoritarianism vs democracy, etc.

It is also not appropriate to be posting links to your political ideology rants on your community profiles. It doesn’t matter what the political rant is about, it isn’t appropriate. If you want to have political rants, post them in places that are less accessible and don’t bring them into our community. It also is not appropriate to publicly post links to other people’s political ideology posts.

If you become the target of moderation, the appropriate response is to work with us rather than trying to take things to the court of public opinion. Launching polls on the forum about your case shows you really would rather fight about and publicize the politics of moderation than be reasonable.

If you have a problem with a moderation decision affecting someone else, the appropriate response is to complain to the moderation team privately first rather than making tens of posts on this forum about it in as many threads as you can. If you find that your private concerns aren’t handled, then you could consider making some polite public post with a concretely argued position rather than some vague concern.

16 Likes