So you've made a mistake and it's public

How many apology posts do you write? Why would you need to write any? I don't understand why any apology needs to be public.

I wonder if this is natural. Those in the community who care more about just making a good encyclopedia are eventually forced out by those who are interested in power games and process. I've heard it mentioned before (I forget if it has some formal name or not) in regards to companies where the people who primarily want to prioritize the goal of the company are eventually replaced by those who primarily want to implement and navigate bureaucracy because they can outcompete them on the local level, even if the company is worse off in general.

Never heard it put like that, but it's pretty on point. The bigger changes I've seen in free software these days, all the way down to systemd, feel very corporate. People try to argue whether it's corporate or not but even that feeling when enough people feel it is detrimental to free software culture. A culture which isn't very much minded or respected by our corporate cousins.

I do not understand peoples literal obsession with grading apologies these days. I've screwed up in big ways in my life before and I had to apologize. The harder work was eventually forgiving myself so that I could move on. I cannot imagine how the expectation that someone is going to be waiting around to grade and critique my apology would weigh on me. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset of someone who engages in that kind of activity must be, what other benign or symbolic things do you question in life? What other baggage have you carried all your life and used to wallop people over the head with?

This "you owe me an apology" trend is wild. Certainly, if you screw up you should apologize if the situations suits it. Rarely are those situations so black and white though. Leaving this to the jury of the public to take sides, to form camps, and to inevitably invade with their pitchforks is the stuff that the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp controversy is fueled by. If someone has wronged you bad enough, take them to court, deal with it there, and leave it there. If things got to that point then no apology will make anything better. At that point, everyone has lost and we're just trying to maintain order.

When I see people grading apologies on Twitter (and at times here) all I see is people propagating a reason to abuse public figures and at times companies. If someone has come to the point of writing a public apology, whether you think it's for damage control or not, it takes some level of humility and self-evaluation. Maybe that triggers nothing, maybe it begets change even in some small way, and maybe it leads to some life altering conclusions. Humans are not machines and we can't just cast people out because we don't feel the vibes of someones apology. For a culture like tech that likes to comment on how terrible cast systems and social hierarchy are, we seem awful quick to throw people into an "other" category because we feel some type of way.

Personally speaking, I think people who grade apologies have a darkness of their own and that darkness begets darkness. The darkness that calls for a public apology and eagerly awaits its arrival for swift and empirical dissection is no better than the incurred darkness of the act itself.