81–90 of 134 posts
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Jon Ringer (who got permabanned) has a YouTube video talking about several events around NixOS moderation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA My own permanban is detailed in this post: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod
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Odd nobody wants to give direct examples of the political opinions/statements not allowed. Lots of talk about them, but nobody will just say what they are?
From the outside, this concerns me for the longevity of the project. I'm sure if it makes it through it could be better for it; but it is concerning and makes me push it further down the list to try.
I've had NixOS on a list to give it a shot one day when I wanna tinker on a weekend project, it's been on that list for quite some time now and just haven't had time for it. I hear good things about the project when I ask other devs, but all I read these days about Nix is about infighting, politics, global bans, governance wrongdoings, and drama. From the outside, this concerns me for the longevity of the project. I'…
And it is not even about politics and woke, I do not think there were any political statement here. It is just obvious this again was written by a crazy person.
So some people had a problem with the Nix leadership for years, they made numerous drama and forked the project (as they have the right to). But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems...
I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
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> Some people just don't seem to understand that 1. Everything is political To "understand" this, it would have to be correct.
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of. Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially. It isn't that it's not correct…
It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.
And in regards to everything being political: Politics certainly informs a lot of stuff in how you perceive the world. But most things aren't political statements, unless you make it so. And I really don't enjoy interacting with people who make any one thing their whole personality, and that includes politics.
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> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t One of those is resigning, but for other reasons. I don't know about the last one. > some arcane art that only experts can truly understand the intricacies of I mean, it kinda is . It doesn't take long to get up to speed, if you have good teachers (I'd say 3 months), but I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again…
I edited the part you quoted (sorry! You were quick), but no fundamental disagreement on either point. I’d just say this in response: 1. Yeah it’s confusing, but keep scrolling — the last one is staying. Also the first one said that they’ll try to do mod stuff in their spare time, which tells me they aren’t really resigning 2. Moderation is certainly a skill, no doubt about it — just as policing is IRL. I just find t…
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I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of. Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially. It isn't that it's not correct…
> It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0]. It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on someth…
That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to. In the interpretation I was referencing, objective reality is assumed to exist, but people are bound to at best asymptotically approach understanding it, yet never be able to fully do so. This also does keep the door open for a common ground to be found, so much so that it even covers the possibility of that not yet existing.
I do identify problems with it though as well. For example, the mere idea of lying becomes fairly challenging to represent in this model (though I'd say not impossible). But yeah, this is the framing I identified to necessarily underpin this claim, if I want to give it any fighting chance at all.
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> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t One of those is resigning, but for other reasons. I don't know about the last one. > some arcane art that only experts can truly understand the intricacies of I mean, it kinda is . It doesn't take long to get up to speed, if you have good teachers (I'd say 3 months), but I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again…
> I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces. Could you elaborate?
Believing that those who behave in Certain Ways have good intentions. (I've fallen afoul of this, too.) There are certain behaviours that, despite appearing benign or even benevolent (especially when considered together with the actor's explanations), have ime a 100% "actually that was malicious" rate. These are quite sophisticated bad actors, and I'd rather they don't know the tells I've identified, but one of the tells involves the charismatic weaponisation of "cancel culture" by abusers, with part of the tell being to wield "the people's" authority (for some value of "the people") to attempt to modify the composition of a moderation team. (I haven't seen the complete tell in this situation, so there are still benign explanations: this just explains my bias in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403417.)
An impedance mismatch between the behaviour of the new moderator, and the behaviour expected by the community. For example: erring too heavy-handed, or too hands-off; mistaking banter for abuse, or abuse for banter.
Not speaking truth to power. In most BDFL-type collaborative projects, the founder guy turns out to be really ill-suited for the role, in one important respect. (Examples: Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andreas Kling.) In many cases, an intervention can resolve this, and save the organisation for a time (e.g. the 2018 Kernel Maintainer's Summit: https://lwn.net/Articles/769117/); in other cases, the organisation heads down the road to irrelevance (e.g. the FSF). (This is of course not the only kind of situation where you'd want to speak truth to power.)
Speaking truth to power undiplomatically. Power is still power: if you suspect the guy in charge is going to take your intervention badly, raise your concerns to the court jester. If you suspect the guy in charge is a bad actor, tread carefully.
Attempting to use an ethical philosophy not conductive to moderation. These include "let's let everyone do everything not illegal!", "if you have anything good to say about bad people, you're a bad person!", "those who disagree with me are bad actors", "can't we all just get along?", "I want to make sure I'm temp-banning the right person before taking action", "it doesn't matter if I'm temp-banning the right person", "people should follow the rules", "people can ignore the rules if they have a good reason", "we don't need lots of rules", "we should design rules that work for every situation", and "we should rely on moderator judgement".