NixOS Foundation board announcement: Moderation concerns

Meta Moderation
36

Indeed, to me the ends does not justify the means. Without a just institution and a just procedure even the most just outcome is meaningless. A lot of people are having a trust issue with the moderators (me included) and some are suspecting there’s partisanship and bias (me not included) and some are even suspecting there’s agenda. Simply using “sealioning” as a catch all term to silence anyone that dares to argue about moderation action is very unhelpful, to say the least.

To me the core issue is that moderation lacks guidelines and oversights. The current code of conduct are basically useless because how short it is an how vague it is, so moderators have to come up with their own rules to moderate public discourse (which is by no means their fault, also I think moderation is definitely necessary). These rules are not visible to the public and exist solely in the head of the moderators.

To me and to many of the doubters, I think publishing out a formal guideline/rule for moderation can greatly help with the trust issue.

Another issue is of course transparency. (TBA)

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38

Statements such as: “People like you are the problem” and “your narcisstic paranoid victim mentality”, where you can envision someone pointing a finger in the direction of someone else is not part of a gentle discussion.

@dedguy21 raised a valid question about what “Protecting” in “Protecting Minorities” means, there is no need for giving live counter examples.

To answer on this topic, I do not think there is any way to “protect” (prevent), but only ways to moderate once the event happened. To that extend the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines provide a section with consequences.

On a similar topic (or to be forked to its own topic?), I would be interested on feedback on why “Protecting Minorities” should be preferred over “Protecting all community members against …”.

While I can understand that some issues might be specific to some groups, I do not understand why we would not offer the same promise of “protection” equally.

The reason I am asking is if we had only 10 rules [1] to write as part of “constitutional rules” for guiding the community should these rules mention minorities at all, or should these rules be broader and more general?

[1] 10 is just a random number which limits the number of rules to something which can be remembered, such as the Mozilla Manifesto

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I suspect what’s being referred to here isn’t a thread though? It’s an RFC, right?

I believe the person you’re responding to has identified as one of those minorities.

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40

They should mention minorities.

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41

People like you are the problem, and the people who defend that kind of behavior against moderation action.

I see it as a pretty concerning statement, and I’ll talk about the the political context of my country to explain this:
Basically, there’s a judge that has a lot of power here, and he censors everyone that speaks against the government under the the premise that it’s to “defend the democracy”. In the last elections, a president was elected (a president which is from this judge’s political side), so, people were wondering about there was an electoral fraud, the way to check it is by inspecting the electronic voting machine software, but the access to the software was limited and there couldn’t be made an assertive inspection on whether there’s something wrong or not with it.
Later, political figures started to demand for a “real inspection” to make 100% that there’s nothing off with them; with that, this judge started to censor these people because it is “against the democracy, you are trying to question the result of a just democratic election”, yes, it seems pretty absurd, how could question if there’s an anti-democratic thing going on be against democracy? And people believed that, as illogical as his statement was, they believed that due to how current politics work, people don’t think, they prefer to stick to a side of the political spectrum and follow their political agenda blindly.
After this exemplification, I say that the phrase

People like you are the problem, and the people who defend that kind of behavior against moderation action

concerns me, because you’re assuming that the moderation should not receive criticism.
Another point about the phrase: you don’t seem open to consider the possibility that you could be wrong about something, because you say “people like you are the problem”, you’re considering these people necessarily as less worthy of respect, thus they should not be considered. Skepticism is something I see as one of the most important things for a human to follow, I won’t even dare to be certain about my own existence, I analyze and suppose something is closer to the truth, but never assume it as the truth, because I could be wrong and should be open to new ideas.
If the a subject such as @dedguy21 had actually advocated for violence or other form of attack against one’s existence, then you could say that it’s dangerous for him to be offered a place to express these destructive ideas, but that was not the case, he was very respectful.
There’s a distinction between people who want to harm and people who want to improve and help with their opinions (you should have contrary opinions to improve something, it’s diversity of ideas, don’t get stuck inside an echo chamber).

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42

I have to ask: what, exactly, are people trying to accomplish by posting in this thread?

The board statement was pretty clear in the next steps: a constitutional assembly will be created within 14 days, more details will be announced, and that’s the venue where further input on governance should be directed.

Why continue relitigating the same topics over and over again in forum threads that aren’t the clearly-indicated venue for governance discussions? What is the goal here?

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I agree that throwing around terms alone is not productive. But in this thread an actual definition was provided for the term “sealioning”.

But it’s often a stilted dialogue to just ask questions that seem to want to lead readers to a predetermined conclusion, to not try to reflect where you are coming from/your own motivations when/if someone is questioning the motivations of others, to not try extend some assumption of goodwill to the other person (a two-way street that of course should happen in both directions).

So it could be more productive to do the some of the following (which likely won’t be labeled as sealioning)

  • Ask questions, but also include your own motivation for asking it, and maybe even acknowledge what the legitimate reasons could be for what you are questioning, unless you really have some evidence that the actions of the person or group are nefarious.

  • Maybe try to acknowledge the points the other person makes or at least try to reflect your understanding, because in asynchronous text communication, it’s better to try and do that, than to keep it sparse, and leave the other person to infer what you meant.

  • Perhaps offer a solution the other person, and the community can use. Even if it is rejected, it is usually more constructive to try this.

I agree that we should not just invoke terms. But I think in this thread people both invoked terms and explained what they mean by it.

I think their goal is to increase the quality of experience and discussion here.

I humbly propose that we should leave off the “which implies zzz” as much as possible. and instead ask the person respectfully if they could expand on what they did, and then discuss their explanation.

Not trying to negate you @Poscat and personally I welcome your view. But I think the way we communicate in an async or synchronous text medium can lead to serious problems and conflict that has proven to be destructive to the community, if we don’t try to put some care into it and take responsibility. I don’t think that trying to address those issues and improve the quality of communication in text mediums should automatically lead to the exclusion of certain groups of people. I think instead that we here, plus anyone who would like to be here, should try to accept responsibility for the nature, direction and outcomes if our communication here. We should try go far enough beyond just asking questions, demanding evidence, or stating that someone’s actions implies something, and instead ask the person to state why they are doing something. (and offer space and understanding if they are not able to).

If someone is a minority, and they state they do not want any “special treatment” then we should respect that. If someone else is a minority, and they state that they need help from the org or community with having agency, access, avoiding harassment, etc then at the same time we should respect that. It’s situational, and we should treat it that way.

We as a community can achieve being co-responsible together.If you think that certain people are being excluded, or end up in a position of injustice: what is a pragmatic solution that could be considered? Is there a way we can reconcile what you propose with what other people propose instead of just contrasting the differences?

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Respect to you @samerose, but this juxtaposition of the two sentences is problematic.

There is no “special treatment.”

Removing or helping to remove obstacles to agency, helping people avoid harassment are equalizing actions, they attempt to make things equal to others in the community.

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I’d say the goal, at least indirectly, is making visible that there’s a problem with the moderation team, its actions in the past months and the possibility that this situation is unchanged going forward.

The fact that these topics keep appearing indicate that they haven’t been adequately addressed, there’s a trust crisis, and I’d say people want to know more details about how the current state of things will influence the procedures mentioned in the board announcement.

In the original board announcement some people already asked related questions:

  • What is “the community” here exactly?
  • Will the current moderation team, which is in the middle of an accountability crisis, moderate these assemblies (I’d say, as if nothing had happened)?
  • If the above is true, given the precedents, how would people trust that the decisions of these assemblies have been made in a transparent and honest way, truly representative of the diversities of “the community”?

I think this very much merits discussion and deserves visibility.

EDIT:

I’m also having a hard time figuring out what is the actual topic of conversation here. The topic title mentions “Moderation concerns” and that’s what my post was about, but then the body of the very first message and much of the conversation deals with diversities/minorities.

Is this the correct place to discuss concerns about moderation itself? This was my understanding but now I’m not sure. If so, why are we conflating two different conversations? Should we split this into separate topics?

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Why continue relitigating the same topics over and over again

Because that’s their objective in the first place, using sealioning? Not sure, just my guess

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I’m new here, but this is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I guess I’ll let this be my first post against my better judgement.

There should be both general rules and specific mention of protecting marginalized groups. You reinforce the parts of the structure that are most under stress.

I’m not going to pretend this issue is apolitical and I will simply get to what is the heart of the issue to me. Currently in many countries to which our community members and contributors belong there is a concerted effort to attack people of specific identities in a variety of ways on both a personal and legal level. This is not a niche issue, this is every day life for some people.

I am of the strong belief that we should specifically rebuke these ideas due to their magnitude and severity. We should make it quite clear that this not a neutral space, but a positive space. That these identitarian attacks found elsewhere are not simply forgone here as a matter of civility and decorum, but explicitly forbidden. That these harmful ideas will not, under any circumstances, be tolerated to take root in our community or culture.

I also don’t believe we require an existing inciting incident to occur first before making such a statement. I believe that this has inherent value that will improve the community and its outreach. I believe we should make a forceful statement that it won’t happen on our watch.

I further reject the very idea that such a rule could be used to deflect substantive criticism against somebody by simply invoking their minority status. A rule stating that identitarian attacks are categorically forbidden is not a rule setting up a protected class immune from criticism, unless what you want to “criticize” is their identity.

Similar ideas, though somewhat vague, already exist in the Contributor Code of Conduct adopted last year, and I’m sure exist elsewhere in the wider NixOS ecosystem. I see no issues with enshrining them directly into the constitution, or another relevant high-level document, to ensure they are always taken into account as part of the broader project’s governance.

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No, sorry that’s not correct. Look at the join dates of people who liked that post.

Also, I’ve been here and I’ve had issues with all of these things.

I’m not alone.

Luckily it looks like steps are happening in the right direction to address these concerns.

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Expand on the topic so there’s already developed ideas/points to be brought, for my case at least. This thread can be used as a resource to discuss about the moderation concerns.

The explicit point about “censoring” was brought by me, and I never talked about the nature of the rule surrounding inclusivity till now; this direct correlation doesn’t exist in my discourse, this thread isn’t talking about one single major point, but I would say two:

1 - mine: concerns about silencing unpopular opinions.
2 - others: concerns about the rules surrounding inclusivity

I also didn’t see (2) point being correlated to the (1) point, thus i their discurse, I didn’t see them associating the inclusivity rule with censorship, so that doesn’t happen in their discourse; I believe you somehow merged both of these and defined that there’s the existence of a point where (1) and (2) was correlated by someone, but I didn’t see that, instead I say (1) being said by “ones”, and (2) being said by another one; maybe you decided to make sure to express your idea in case there’s one who associates both points, even though no person explicitly said so in this thread.

About my point, It goes beyond the case of the “identity” aspect, it’s much more general. Basically: I have seem enough of human behavior to conclude that when given the opportunity, one will silence opinions that doesn’t align “well” with ones beliefs, it doesn’t matter the political compass; have in mind when Plato was ostracized for 10 years out of Athenas for his beliefs, or the folk praising the burning of witches some hundreds of years ago, mindlessly following something they accepted as truth. These are absurd examples, while this one is way less destructive, but the reason they exist are the same: this specific part of the human nature.

There should be effort to prevent this, a set of moderators that can differentiate between hate/destructiveness and valid discourse, neutral and thoughtful community moderators that aren’t too inclined to a political side and can identify when something is destructive. This community flag system to hide comments makes me doubtful, I don’t want the community to censor me because I said something that they don’t want to hear, I want neutral people that have the thought and concern to filter what should be filtered.

I was about to develop more here, but it would turn too “deep”, so I simplified everything.

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51

You can be more confident next time because many of us, some who have been core developers here for several years, support your point of view.

I would like to extend this a little further:

Some people always want to contrast “minorities” with “majorities” and firmly believe that they (will always be) among the latter. Based on this logic, they believe that “protecting minorities” is to give special rights to these people, therefore, their rights is compromised. I believe this is why people say this is “political” and firmly believe that we should be “apolitical” because it is these minorities who are actively “stealing” this rights and the act will harm the “interests of the whole”.

This is not the case. Minority is more of a situation rather than an identity. People may be trapped in them for various reasons. “Protecting minorities” is not just for some kinds of them that can be enumerated regarding race, gender identity and disability, but also protecting everyone, and ensuring that as we move forward, no one will be left behind because of others’ bad behavior towards their own circumstances. This creates a sense of security for all contributions, just as Nix creates a sense of security for packagers to avoid dependency hell. That’s why this rule is so important.

I am happy to see that NixOS is improving accessibility and putting it before closure size in many cases. Consider this as an example: suppose adding a screen reading library might add 100MB to the system closure, but make it easy for the visually impaired to use a minimal NixOS image. On the face of it, this behavior harms many users because they waste extra traffic and disk space just to add a read-aloud option that doesn’t seem to be of use to them. But in reality, can you guarantee that your eyesight will not deteriorate after decades? Can you guarantee that you won’t need to use NixOS after myopia surgery? Can you guarantee that after you introduce NixOS to your visually impaired friends, they will not fall into disappointment and self-deprecation due to poor accessibility? “Minority” is always an inseparable part of “majority”. The two are closely related and share weal and woe.

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(emphasis mine).

What the majority who raise this concern completely miss is that the status quo societal structures ensure that their rights are always there. What “protecting minorities” means is that there are structures in place to make sure their voices are heard and their experiences are not questioned into silence. That is, we must ensure that the structure that already exists for the majority also exists for minorities if what is desired is that minorities participate.

The difference is that we don’t have to work for the structure that is already there for the majority, but we do have to work to build the one for minorities.

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Edit: having to make corrections. Speech to text isn’t capturing correctly.

I’m interested in how that looks though. We are past the age of institutional discrimination, what applies to the majority inherently applies to minorities today.

I am saying this as a minority who appreciates the paths that lead to my equality and having a voice that is equally heard as others.

Fist point I should make, this forum’s default is an anonymous status, so no one knows that you’re a minority unless you call attention to it, which you do have the right do. But how could they otherwise know to discriminate?
You have the right to be who you are and not be discriminated against which I agree.

I’m still not understanding how the current CoC which applies to everyone doesn’t help protect everyone currently. And why they need to specifically call out protections for minorities? I’m just not sure how the current CoC doesn’t do that already while still being applied to everyone equally.

So I need to understand personally what this protection looks like? How is it being applied?.

Respect is one a pillar of the CoC, so what is being added on top of that that specifically protects minorities. Honestly, it might just be semantics that is throwing people off. I think a clear definition of what it looks like what it means would go pretty far to calming people down, but so far everything has been vague.

And I’m saying this as someone who is experienced potential abuse of a “Protected Class” in the Enterprise world. Specifically when it comes to a dissenting opinion. I know this is anecdotal and I hate that I might be helping prejudiced people, but since I’ve seen it, I have to mention that some “protected classes” think that the only reason why you’re questioning or pushing back on their opinion is because they are a protected class, which honestly mostly isn’t true, just don’t like the idea.

So I definitely feel like we should be a “safe space”. It should be known that this is a safe space and I don’t want to bang the drum on the same point, but I think people are getting lost in the semantics of the language specifically because what’s inherently “protecting minorities” means we’re doing something extra. What extra is being done that the current CoC doesn’t already cover.

I think that would go a long way in helping people how it affects everyone in the community. Again, I’m saying this as a minority myself who understand definitely pre-1960s. It was important because literally discrimination was legal but we’re post-legal discrimination so I’m just trying to understand what protections looks like in today’s world.

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Jon did post a thread. I can’t find it anymore. I did also find it horrendous, as I could easily see how some of our community members would obviously take it as a direct attack against them, and that they would feel “attacked because they are members of a minority”.

And this attack was perpetrated by a powerful person from the within community: the current Release Manager.

This post was very calm and was only asking one simple question. Yet, it was impossible not to see how a powerful direct attack against minorities it was. Maybe this question could be asked, but obviously not in this way, at this time, and by this person. And he did plead guilty.

@nixnewb: you are asking if “anyone in these forum” “writtien anything against a minority” (sic). I have an answer for you: yes, I think at the very least Jon, in that post. But please ask your questions in a more civilized way: I find your rant unwelcoming, and therefore unwelcome, especially in post 37.

Profile - jonringer - NixOS Discourse doesn’t list it though, so I guess it was deleted. And my memory is not perfect: I mostly recall my interpretation and my feelings.

dedguy21 ? I think he state that, given his experience as member of a minority, he doesn’t see how one could feel threaten.

Yet, we have plenty of evidence of other nix community members from minorities stating they felt attacked, especially since some of those left our community, loudly or not, either for Aux or for plain nothing.

(I’m terrified of this “plain nothing”. How could one abandon all the technical promises of beloved Nix ? This is still what eg. Xe is doing, as they try to migrate to Ansible.)

So let’s use logic here: some people don’t feel attacked, and some other people do feel attacked. Can we deny that it is possible to feel attacked ? I don’t think so. Does anyone stating they don’t feel attacked change anything ? I don’t think so.

I also think we want this community not be shattered: “The community is more important than the product”. For this, I think we should ensure our members will not feel attacked.

Btw, claiming this community is safe while some of its member expressed they don’t feel safe imply denying them their own feelings. Which is attacking them even more, and reinforcing their unsafe feeling, so not helping.

I think we should have a moderation team overlooking this to block attacks. And I think our current moderation team is doing what they can, but that their task is way too huge.

I’m not saying they are perfect (they are humans, what do you expect ? Who ever said they were perfect ?), not saying they couldn’t do better, but I think we should be very thankful for their huge work and dedication, and try to help them.

I am not sure about that, and can provide this as a list of counter-examples to consider: Capital punishment for homosexuality - Wikipedia

I guess this is because minorities asked for specific protection against some class of attacks they regularly take. Those class of attacks may not be obvious for everyone until enough people get educated on some specific points. Therefore, I think we just have to make them clear and known by writing them at the right place.

In a more general way, why do we even write a CoC ? Because there are individuals who are not able to properly be respectful with all other members of the community. Maybe because they are new, and/or they don’t know all represented culture / orientation / background / etc well enough, so it can be hard not to offend anyone. Specific protection rules can help with that, by providing hints to avoid most common wrong scenarii, and be used as reference when someone doesn’t understand their wrong doing.

I agree that once we will have observed a fair amount of time without any offense against one of those “specific” rules, we might be able to remove it, and I will be very happy as it will signal the world would be a better place with more tolerant and more educated humans.

I agree this is something that must be considered. But I do not think this is a good enough reason to deny protection to those who ask. And we are talking about protection, not immunity.

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On the Nixos Homepage, there are no statements reflecting any of the issues which are presently convulsing the community and causing great internecine schism.

Could somebody within Nixos please define the corporate morality, and then place it on the homepage in black & white?

Surely in an open source project there will be millions of disparate people and myriad different worldviews. People just have to respect each other, and get on with things. We are here for the
technology, surely; beers and bonhomie are a bonus.

If the enterprise is in thrall to some greater entity, (I have gleaned that there is some kind of MIC controlling hand), then perhaps also a statement regarding the sponsors on the homepage.

Or perhaps a denial:

e.g.
“Nixos does not endorse the use of its software in AI systems purposed for bombing civilians”

(This is purely exemplary - the statement would simply reflect the actual corporate moral stance)

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Hi and I suppose welcome to the community, since you registered only about three months ago.

I’ve been active for about 5 years now, and these days I derive all of my income from working on the Nix ecosystem. While from the very beginning I wished for such clear collective statements on many issues, the reality is that this is not how the community works. In my view, the cohesion and availability required for timely statements that would have far-reaching consequences on outward perception and community dynamics is not there. This is mainly a group of volunteers, very few of us happen to get paid to contribute, but we’re anything but a corporation. The community has grown organically over 20 years, without explicit leadership. We currently don’t have efficient or even structured processes to reach consensus on sensitive issues, let alone binding agreements.

This is in fact one major reason why we published the message this thread refers to. In my opinion it’s the most important, most collective, and most timely ever — and still comes way too late and leaves many questions open. Someone said: a lot of thunks are being forced these days, which have been long overdue.

That said, I have high hopes we will grow a fair bit of organisational maturity in the next months, which I think is unavoidable for a community of that size (~100 closely involved, ~800 active contributors, supposedly ~5 000 power users, likely > 15 000 users) to even survive. But it’s a bit much to ask what amounts to “a bunch of people” to act like what you may expect from a company.

Please be patient. And if that’s too boring, try to help solving the problems you find most important. Asking or demanding won’t help, already in principle: you can’t make anyone do anything, and even whoever agrees with you still needs the time take care of the issue. Ideally that would just be you yourself. :slightly_smiling_face:

https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute

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Thank you for the considered reply Frickler.

n.b. I meant corporate in the sense of “a collective body of people”.

It seems like Nix has carved its path like a river.
It all seems good to me, because as a recent adopter,
I am blessed with the most incredible piece of software
and it is a game-changer. (& I am sure for many, a life-changer).

Like you say, now is the time shore things up a bit. Define things a
bit less loosely.

Why not identify as many of these Nixos users as you can & send out a questionnaire to determine their level of Nix expertise.
Then badge them in the community, you say would be an Alpha, me a Delta or whatever.

Then find out what the concerns of the community are - obviously
someone like yourself who is steeped in Nix and its technical and corporate ecosystem, will have a lot more to say than myself.

Once the agendas can be determined, then they can be thrashed out.
Plebiscites etc. People voting & inputting according to their skill set obviously.

Regarding abusive behaviour and bullying, I am shocked that this
has reared its ugly head in this community, especially given that
most, if not virtually all, of our interactions are not even physical.
The fact that this is being debated is really sad. What someone does at the weekend is irrelevant to me in this context. Have they built a
flake that I can use? Yes. Fantastic. Thank you. Move on.

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