So why did you post to reddit first, without waiting to see what the actual reactions to the Discourse thread would be?
No, not until he proved that he isn’t so drama baiting prone at the very least. Like tbh he just needs to shut up and accept criticism and change as a person.
Well, I did intend to do “the right thing” first, which was to move the discussion off of the commit request thread.
But you’re right, looks like the reddit post landed 4 mins before the discourse thread.
So why did you post to reddit first, without waiting to see what the actual reactions to the Discourse thread would be?
Probably me just conceding defeat, and using reddit as an outlet. Discourse should have been a priority, that’s on me. I apologize for acting out of my own fears.
This shouldn’t be an issue in future as I don’t intend to reside in matrix or non-technical discussions moving forward (outside of RFC175).
I also wanted to address @JulienMalka 's comment:
@domenkozar is there a rationale why you decided to reinvite Jon despite the community feedback ? Given the criticality of the commit bit rights on a repo as big and important as nixpkgs, I think we need to build ourselves a better on-boarding process than the current one that seems to be “everybody ends up being invited without consideration for the voice of the community”.
Be it only for matters of software supply chain security, giving commit access to someone that do not have the trust of the community seems very bad to me.
despite the community feedback
The community doesn’t universally condemn me as an individual. Many have reached out through direct messages in support of me taking a stand on certain issues. And the vocality of the community is heavily influenced by who feels empowered to speak.
Be it only for matters of software supply chain security, giving commit access to someone that do not have the trust of the community seems very bad to me.
In my 12,000+ plus reviews, personal PRs, or merge actions, I have never misused that responsibility. I find this insulting that you would insinuate that I would do anything but try to improve a technology I have already invested several thousands of hours of my life improving. I’m a strong advocate of not merging your own PRs, and having two person accountability. But nonetheless, maybe there should be a review of commit bits post xz attack.
What was your goal in saying this? Doing personal jabs just re-inforces that I’m not welcome here and encourages me to do “drama baiting prone” actions on other platforms.
Like tbh he just needs to shut up and accept criticism and change as a person.
What about my person needs to change?
I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. I tried to.
I guess it’s time to just go ahead and burst the boil.
Jon, you, and the pals at RFC175, are currently the main reason I do not feel welcome in the NixOS community these days.
The continued FUD and push at mounting a case for a conspiracy to “silence” people is… a conspiracy theory that holds no water. There is no such conspiracy. There is no “silencing” of “wrong lean”. There is no “agenda”, other than the one being projected.
The fact the NixOS organization tacitly (among others, via the marketing team leadership) continues associating with an unmoderated place like the subreddit where you continued creating FUD during your time-out due to disruptive behaviour makes me uneasy.
Speaking of, I personally think continuously mounting FUD in public topically-NixOS areas during your time-out should, in itself, have warranted a perma-ban.
And now when you come back, you directly go to the conspiracy theories and throw large amount of FUD. Yikes.
I don’t think I want to participate in a community where the organization isn’t even able to cut off the obviously bad parts. The people acting in disruptive manner, who when confronted state it’s being done about their world view. No. Jon, you are someone I do not want to work with. Your behaviour is simply unacceptable in anything remotely close to a workplace, and moreso in a community.
If you actually had stopped yourself to technical contributions, like you continuously try to lean on as an excuse, literally none of that would have happened. You made your bed, now lie in it.
Or that would be what I would be saying if the community had the ability to moderate appropriately, and wasn’t walking on broken eggshells due to continuous FUD and pressure being mounted by people like the RFC175 pals and external banned individuals.
(Now, that is a conspiracy that exists, and is being done in broad daylight! Hopefully you’re just being swept in by the support coming from there, and not willfully engaging in it. Hi srid!)
And then, the commit being given back despite what happened mere moments before is what breaks me. I think it should have been a good moment to pause and re-think giving back the commit bit to someone who is well on their way to self-selecting themselves out of the community again.
Whew.
TLDR; I can’t believe after these unneeded actions the commit bit was given without a second thought.
Let’s just note that the commit bit doesn’t make taking any moderation action that becomes necessary any harder to do. If the mod team makes the judgment call that someone’s current behavior needs to be curbed though a temporary or permanent suspension, then that’s a call that can be made regardless of committer status. It’s not a badge of ‘we think this person is above reproach’ or anything.
I continue to hope, because I’m a perpetual idealist, that the current members of the mod team can talk Jon down from the ledge he keeps putting himself on, making such actions unnecessary; but if they’re necessary, the commit bit is not a barrier. It’s simply an orthogonal privilege.
By this you mean that you posted to reddit first, then to discourse, then tried to lie about the timeline in hopes that nobody would look? There isn’t any lag in posting to discourse; there may be some lag in posting to reddit.
This is a bad look.
Others already touched on this, but can you please reiterate on how exactly the words you used in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/50105#issuecomment-2179462978 work towards that goal?
Why was a “I got unbanned and would like my commit bit back please” not sufficient? Can you see how that differs from what you ended up posting, and how the reaction would have been less bad? Don’t you see how many person-hours are being spent on just managing the fallout of your actions once again, precious time that people could have instead spent on technical work and on making Nixpkgs / NixOS the best package repository and Linux Distribution?
With that post, you successfully managed to shift the question from “should you get the commit bit back” to “should you be banned permanently, this time”.
True, and I agree, nor did I intend to imply it wasn’t the case. We have precedent that shows this is most likely accurate.
I disagree.
Having the commit bit is a signal.
A signal of the trust that the organization puts in a person. That the person can be trusted to be worked with.
This trust had, in my opinion, been overstepped, at least on the short term, by the immediate behaviour.
In a lot of threads, it at least appeared acceptable to tell me to “fuck off”, go elsewhere, or other colorful of saying you’re not welcome. If I did anything remotely similar, I would have been booted significantly faster. Why weren’t some individuals’ behaviors addressed? I don’t know, to the defense of the moderators, you’ll never be fast enough, and the escalation likely already happened when you “arrive on scene”. But it does feel like a double standard when personal attacks aren’t really addressed, upvoted, and seemingly condoned.
Certain posts seem to find themselves missing, like my response to raito - current page. It’s not crazy to see a pattern of behavior, jump to a conclusion (e.g. being silenced/erased/canceled), and see the confirmation bias you want to see.
Well, r/nixos seems pretty tired of all the drama, so it seems to be resolving itself. My post from yesterday was essentially people telling me that I was out-of-line, and the feedback was a contributing factor to me editing my commit request post.
Bringing in actions on external platforms would be a slippery slope, people have posted a lot of hate. Not to mention it encourages people to dig through people’s history to find dirt on them.
My commit bit request just initially stated that I disagreed with the circumstances in which my commit bit was removed. And was more aimed at the “reason for jonringer being suspended” letter (my first time doing so in written form on a NixOS platform) than extrapolating to any type of FUD. I’ll agree that my reddit post was definitely me giving into FUD, after having 4+ people post that I shouldn’t have the commit bit restored and a downvote brigade on my application.
There’s a lot of people who have dirtied their hands since NixCon EU. It will be hard to find someone who hasn’t thrown a stone.
The people acting in disruptive manner, who when confronted state it’s being done about their world view.
My personal stance has always been some variation of:
These can mean very different things, depending on who you ask to interpret it. Which I think is at the heart of a lot of this miscommunication.
I’m sorry you feel that way, I quite enjoyed working with you. I’ll reserve my right that I’m misunderstood, and in a face to face scenario that we can come to some mutual understanding. Easy to write-off people through text: empathy, compassion, and sincerity have a hard time being conveyed. Especially in this polarized landscape.
The lean on contributions was meant more as a way to show that I’m not some troll or some bad actor. Why would I spend thousands of hours of my life improving nix just to make a social jab? no one would.
Prior to my suspension, I really wanted to be seen as a peer, who may not agree with the way raito and hexa were trying to create a selection sponsorship committee (and it’s implications in community decision making), and I would prefer to have something like an unambiguous policy which could have predictable results in the future. Now I’m fine with just going back to GitHub - NixOS/nixpkgs: Nix Packages collection & NixOS and grinding away again.
That’s a bit into the victim blaming territory. There was no way to know the magnitude of response, do you think I want to be in this position? No. My happiest time in Nix was pre-RFC98, before any conception of Nix being anything but a “space for hackers, scratching their own itches”.
Exactly this, you’re not attacking my person (other than the insinuation of me being a “bad part” which needs to be cut off). But you seem to be sincere about your viewpoint, and I appreciate the criticism. At the very least it’s some meaningful insight as to why there’s so much “hate” thrown my way.
Hi srid!
The commit bit could have also been quietly added back when I was added to the organization, instead I had to manually poke around to ask for it, then asked to make a public appeal for the commit bit back. Creating the preconditions for this thread now.
I would argue that all of the publicity was unneeded, and AFAICT, this is the first precedent of a committer being suspended. So there wasn’t an “already established paradigm” to follow as you’re insinuating. As to why I made the long elaborate history of my contributions? That’s what the template roughly equate to: intro, reason for wanting to be a committer, some prose about your contributions, and a stats section on some quantity of contributions.
I don’t see an issue with me being proud of my contributions, everyone should be proud of the work they do. If you’re referring to my additional commentary about my suspension, yea; and many other people, including reddit, agreed it was over the line. I subsequently removed it.
For me, there still hasn’t really been any “closure” around my suspension. There was no one-on-one moderation discussion, no outreach from a foundation member, no pre-action letter of “this is where you’re behavior is unacceptable”. Just a condescending tone of, “take this time to reflect on your actions”, here’s a very long letter two days AFTER your suspension with the some reasons.
I do see the fallout. I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t:
Fixating on me, and taking turns just prompts me to respond, which further sinks everyone’s time investment.
Going to step away from this discussion, as I don’t think it’s a productive use of anyone’s time; and re-litigation will likely be the only consequence with further discussion.
EDIT: grammar
mod hat on.
Lots of points were made, and I think there is a consensus to try to disengage.
I’m not saying this is solved, but this has been very heated for 12h, so the least I can do now is increasing the cooldown.
We’re still working for a way out.
I know of only one case where you were told to “fuck off” on official platforms. And in that specific case, the person saying so was muted for it by moderation. And to be fair, the person telling you to “fuck off” only did so after lots of provocation on your part and most of the people in the room being fed up with your behavior. I do not want to protect such behavior, but you have to understand that if you put too much pressure on something, it will snap.
Oh, btw: samueldr's AP stuff seems relevant to this discussion 
I just want to point out that you have an easy way out, finally do the thing that should have been done months ago. Perma-ban the person wasting countless hours of maintainer time.
I’m considering walking away from the project altogether, not because of the reinstatement of his commit bit but because we haven’t banned him again. The behaviour demonstrated yesterday shows he has learned absolutely nothing this time around, that the extensive reasoning given to the original ban still applies in its entirety, and that he is poised to drive away another several existing and new contributors if we do not do anything.
This entire affair has wasted hundreds [1] of hours of contributors’ time that could have been spent doing literally anything useful, instead of “balanced moderation” so that “everyone has their view heard”. It is like letting your neighbour’s pet tiger eat your rabbit and leave 5lb of excrement on your porch every day while you have to hold your nose and not say anything to “protect their freedom to have exotic pets”. If I were working on a project that wants to get things done, I would have banned Jon and all of his sympathizers months ago [oh wait, I do. and we banned him months ago!]. At this point it’s not even remotely about politics but simple wasted resources.
In light of this, I will tender my resignation from the project if he is not re-banned with prejudice in the next week, because it appears that the priorities of NixOS are first and foremost that anyone should be allowed to waste our time and energy without consequence to “protect their 
”. Every minute that I spend on NixOS could be spent on a fork that actually cares about getting things done instead of forming committees for the protection and preservation of the committee for preservation and protection of the status quo.
Inaction on patterns of behaviour that are this long running and well documented to “protect freeze peach” is not protecting anyone’s speech but wasting everyone’s time.
There’s a clear point where someone drives away more contributions than they do themselves and I think that line has been clearly and shamefully crossed through the actions demonstrated in the past few months. Burning out the entire previous mod team is reason enough for permanent banning.
Jon: I beg you to try to see how your patterns of behaviour over a period of years are not conducive to working in a team based project. Try to understand why people are opposed to you being in positions of power. Hint: it’s not your politics, I promise. It’s not a witch hunt either. It’s the actions you have taken, the repeatedly doing the same thing in the hopes that nobody has a backbone and will just roll over, the intentionally starting drama in out-of-community places [2], the playing the victim the whole time instead of thinking even a little bit about why people find your behaviour unacceptable.
Personally I think we have given you too many chances to do this already, but I nevertheless am asking you as an individual to try to learn from this experience even if the final outcome is that you are banned permanently.
[1]: Low estimate. thousands, if we count the time wasted on the status quo enthusiasm committee on zulip whose creation was significantly spurred by Jon and company.
[2]: For example: The posts on /r/nixos from above. Incidentally, Srid (who has been banned for extremely good reasons) is having a great time brigading community spaces from his little unmoderated playground, /r/nixos. I must note: /r/nixos is a moderation free zone due to the inactions of @domenkozar, the only even remotely active moderator on there. This, too, is shameful as a community, and should not be without direct personal (edit for clarity: potential moderation/social) consequence on Domen for the masses of wasted time and burnout that platforming Srid and company there has on the moderation team here, IMO.
Do you all really believe that threatening to leave is a valid excuse to ban a long standing contributor? Why do you even have this attitude. Do you really believe in an open-source project as large as nixpkgs, that it is even possible to be socio-political aligned enough with every contributor to simultaneously keep pace of development while banning anyone who doesn’t fall into your tiny (likely ideosyncractically defined) cliche?
This is really what’s best for the project eh? Really?
I don’t respond seriously to abdication of resposibility as an adult with personal agency. Nobody “had” to waste time on this, it was a personal choice. That personal choice is not Jon’s responsibility, and therefore, he is not culpable in any way for it.
Hi, I haven’t read this thread and I don’t really care to read all of it.
I’ve always intended to get back into the Nix community after the issues with community management are sorted to my satisfaction.
If jonrigner gets his commit bit back, I’m gonna be gone for good.
Create whatever future you want to live in.
Be well,
Xe
EDIT: Looks like his commit bit got back anyways.
I hope you all enjoy the future you have created.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Since this is a personal attack and threatening, I’m going to respond here.
I’ve spend a lot of time contacting the original admins to get moderation permission because there was serious abuse happening back then because there was literally no moderators on /r/NixOS and I wanted to make sure direct threats are not happening.
I hope moderation team takes action here, but I can’t possibly be blamed for things I didn’t do because I’m running a company and have no time for children’s games.
its grim in here, lots of name calling and dog piling. this should be closed. nothing productive is happening.
I think this will be the last chance you will be given on this platform before a permanent ban, Jon. I say this as an outsider who has read many threads about your “suspension.” It is better for the community, the project, and even you if you don’t participate much in any non-technical or meta discussions.
I think the reason for your initial ban was pretty vague as well, and the Reddit post being created in anticipation of backlash seems like a wrong move. You walked back the things on the GitHub issue and admitted to this.
I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation now that the commit rights have been given. A few people have taken a strong stand on putting your reinstatement over the project itself and are willing to die on that hill.
The comment made by someone about permanently banning you and your “sympathizers” to get any work done, I assume, is an exaggeration. If permanent banning is taken this lightly, it is a clear abuse of power.
I, too, agree that this thread should be locked to stop the drama. I hope the best for you, Jon, in your technical contributions and plead with others not to engage in any likely future drama unless it is paramount to the survival of the project, for your own mental sanity.
PS: And I would personally de-unlist this thread after locking it, it serves as any future proof/evidence for all sides.
The topic was unlisted 15 hours ago and still received another 20 replies of heated discussion. Maybe you should just lock it? The only people who are going to reply are people who have already said their piece and randos linked in from various online peanut galleries. I don’t know what kind of productive discussion you expect to happen here that merits leaving it open.
It literally, factually, was deemed not acceptable, since the person in question was delivered moderation action — and immediately, I might add, without prior deliberation, which is far more decisive than any actions taken against you so far. So you saying this is at best misinformation and at worst just a flat out lie, and you’ve already lied in this thread.
Nice distraction tactic; that’s a whataboutism, not a response to what @samueldr actually said.
Non-apology apology - Wikipedia. The thing is, it doesn’t matter if we’re all misunderstanding you or not: you’re making things worse, and we want you to stop. If someone is earnestly trying, but still being an asshole despite their best efforts, they still need to stop being an asshole. When they step back, and stop being an asshole, then they can have a heart to heart.
I’m sure you don’t want to be in this position, and I don’t envy it either, but by your own admission you understood there would be backlash from your public post. It is not victim blaming to say you need to suffer the consequences of your own actions.
All of this being said, Jon, there is an aspect here which has been unfair to you: @domenkozar’s irresponsibility in directing you to make that post without communicating to the moderation team or other members of Nixpkgs governance first is not on you.
i admit that this
versus this
and this
really makes me think. i’ve seen this specific set of circumstances occur more than once in the last few months, so i’d like to explore it because this sort of thing is intellectually interesting to my brain worms.
in that thread (a new one linking here just made it back to the subreddit courtesy of a new friend in /r/nixos with zero other contributions on reddit, cool!) you spend most of the time dismissing anything against you in an attempt to - once again - reframe the conversation in a way that fills me with second-hand embarrassment. i won’t copy anything further from the (public) reddit thread, as i don’t want to be accused of “doxing”.
to be honest the fact you repeatedly and deliberately act in this manner with your full name and face is extremely intriguing. not suggesting that this affair be conducted behind a 'nym, but i can’t tell if it’s cultural differences between my country and yours or if this is a genuine argument form that i’ve just never seen before - a microcosm of social interaction where tools more precise than a jackhammer were never discovered.
either way, this particular flavour is extremely difficult to view in good faith: running around to try and take advantage of fractal decision making is 1) really obvious to the people paying attention, and 2) something that has a surprisingly long social tail.
we haven’t interacted directly at all, mostly due to a pretty big timezone difference. i’d like to take this opportunity to do so to inform you - as nothing but constructive criticism - that just reading how you argue these points is exhausting and no matter how many times i’ve tried to give the benefit of the doubt, it is extremely indicative that the intention is to suck all the oxygen out of any and all argument until there’s only one person standing. every single comment gets its own reply from you, almost every time. always there; it’s like watching a runescape botter. you’re turning yourself into a nix-centric public figure but you’re not liking it.
unlike violations of sparkling silicon, you cannot simply turn a community off and on again. social harms take time to heal, and forcing the point doesn’t stem any bleeding.
–
no matter which side of this discussion you’re on, the fact that you suggest a volunteer who is freely providing their time to janitor the stained walls that is reddit should face consequences for not doing enough for free is simply broken. i don’t have another descriptor for it. it’s just broken. /r/nixos was never an official space. it does not and has never represented nix, the nix foundation, or even the nix userbase beyond a select few power-posters and neofetch enthusiasts.
@domenkozar i hope you know that this is categorically not a common sentiment. thank you for stepping up and volunteering your time and patience.
–
i’ve watched 30-odd friends walk away from nix over the last few months; many of them helped me learn it, and now i’m writing a screed in my lunch break in an attempt to save the sanity of the remaining few still in the community. unlike myself, many of my friends are part of one or more groups commonly marginalised by society, and some of them have exited the community because they don’t feel socially safe.
so like xe, this will be my final “contribution” (of which i unfortunately only got in a few publicly before everything exploded). i have far too many other things to do and just reading this go around and around makes me too tired to bother.
gg. be well.
