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No, they don't! Entitled people doing opinion psyops normalizing overreach is the problem. We are private citizens. Public officers need to be transparent! Not the other way around.
Are systemd developers public officers in your mind?
There’s nothing “overboard” about pushing back on unnecessary political meddling. The operating system does not need to know your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter software, open source or otherwise.
Political entities do not have the authority to compel this kind of activity. If you go along with it, you are given them a reason to keep going. You have to look at this from a rights perspective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is classic bad online-forum-moderator behavior, that you see in all sorts of online chat and message board spaces where there's a moderator who has the power to lock threads at all. Obviously, the systemd maintainers have no obligation to adhere to any particular moderation policy on their org's github issues, but they definitely deserve mockery for this.
Have you ever been on the moderator side of this? There's ultimately no perfectly polite and collegial way to say "we've heard your concerns, but this is our decision and it's not subject to your review". Being more direct about it would only have inflamed the situation further.
In my ideal world, instead of having Github accounts everyone in the thread would be posting under their own personal ID (in a way similar to ATProto, Nostr, etc.), using a discussion UX that would allow Soller to seamlessly continue the thread along with any other willing participants even after the systemd maintainers blocked it from their own end (which is their right to do). Perhaps if systemd entirely forked over this, this issue comment thread could seamlessly transition into a new issue on the fork, to serve as documentation for why the fork works the way it does.
In general, sometimes the best response to a moderator banning some kind of discussion is for everyone who is subject to that ban to fork the discussion thread itself; and online communication software should more readily facilitate this.
As a parent, I welcome these changes. When people say, "parent your kids," this is what I need to do that: an os-level setting that serves as a source of truth, a browser that reads it, and sites that require it. If you don't like those things then use another distro or create your own, branch a browser, and create your own Internet. I welcome that. Until then, don't say the contradictory phrases of "parent your kids…
As a parent, I welcome these changes. When people say, "parent your kids," this is what I need to do that: an os-level setting that serves as a source of truth, a browser that reads it, and sites that require it. If you don't like those things then use another distro or create your own, branch a browser, and create your own Internet. I welcome that. Until then, don't say the contradictory phrases of "parent your kids…
This is silly. No parent who is seriously looking for your requirements is going to count on a UNIX OS setting to enforce restrictions on what their child can do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever been on the moderator side of this? There's ultimately no perfectly polite and collegial way to say "we've heard your concerns, but this is our decision and it's not subject to your review". Being more direct about it would only have inflamed the situation further.
My actual opinion here is that Github issue threads shouldn't exist at all; and pretty much all online communication should be redesigned in such a way as to prevent anyone taking the role of a moderator to lock down a coherent comment thread from everyone else who wants to participate. (I agree this is a hard chat UX problem). In my ideal world, instead of having Github accounts everyone in the thread would be posti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My actual opinion here is that Github issue threads shouldn't exist at all; and pretty much all online communication should be redesigned in such a way as to prevent anyone taking the role of a moderator to lock down a coherent comment thread from everyone else who wants to participate. (I agree this is a hard chat UX problem). In my ideal world, instead of having Github accounts everyone in the thread would be posti…
I think that's affirmatively a bad idea, even given a solution to the UX problem. Maintaining a healthy discussion forum requires the ability to terminate bad discussions that are causing problems, and making decisions effectively requires that there be a seam-ful distinction between the thread where a decision is discussed and meta-threads where someone else in some other context wants to talk about the same issues.…
A moderator who claims to be maintaining a healthy discussion forum and terminating bad discussions that are causing problems, is likely to actually be stifling dissent - or discussion that an individual moderator finds personally embarrassing - or just exercising a personal vendetta against somebody. This is as true in open-source software project issue thread moderation on Github as it is anywhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Death threats are not ‘blowback’.
Well, they are, but that excuses nothing.
Technically, I can claim that every comment on Hacker News is a blog post, since it has a permalink and shows (threaded!) replies beneath it — supported by both posts and comments being the same /item?id= — but to make such a claim would be inappropriate in the site's context, both because certain 'items' get special treatment as 'posts' (e.g. cannot be downvoted), and because their underlying equivalence is invalid in the site's context. In the context of political pressure, 'blowback' describes press and public opinion drama; 'death threat' describes a criminal act. That some blowback contains death threats does not permit them to be lumped under the non-criminal heading of 'blowback'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The operating system does not need to know your full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field for the date of birth. > Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed an…
unfortunately the article does not mention who is responsible for the alleged misinformation campaign