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NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

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Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#91

Post by bookshed »

################## MODERATION TEAM REMAINS IN PLACE - NOTHING HAS CHANGED ##################

If you review the post and refresh it frequently, you will observe the censorship in action.

Some instances of censorship are quite extreme. They censor individuals for even the mildest comments. I saw one person get flagged for linking to Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis and requesting more scientific discussion. The TLDR was something like "More of THIS" were "THIS" was a hyperlink to Dolstra's PHD thesis that sparked NixOS. I wanted to reply, stepped away for a meal, and by the time I returned, the comment had been censored.

NixOS isn't a technical project anymore. It's just Dolstra's stole life's work being kept in life support. I don't care which side of the political spectrum you are... this should anger you. They stole this man's life's work through distasteful political shenanigans.

It's like removing Linus from Linux (unsuccessful removal attempts), Stallman from FOSS (unsuccessful removal attempts), and Eelco Dolstra from NixOS (removed).

I don't care for these people thoughts or beliefs, I see them for what they are, thought leaders. People that ACTUALLY move us (humanity) FORWARD. They should stay in place leading their respective movements for as long as possible or until they break the LAW. Not some "constitution of NixOS" or "bylaws of NixOS", the actual LAW of their respective jurisdiction.

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#92

Post by Akronymus »

perching_aix wrote: post #89
Akronymus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to. In the interpretation I was…

> That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to.

Absolutely. I was just giving my own 2 cents. I am not that good at expressing my thoughts. And tbf, not everyone who goes "everything is political" thinks that there is no objective reality and vice versa. So my wording was definitely badly formulated. But I definitely experienced a decent overlap, and find it very hard to engage in a civil way with people who think everything is political + no objective reality existing.

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#93

Post by squigz »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #90
zahlman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces. Could you elaborate?

Making Hard Decisions to resolve larger disputes involving multiple people – this is usually a mistake because large disputes are often really hard to understand (so you usually end up picking a side, with that being the wrong side), and they normally fall into one of a handful of archetypes: it's better to analyse them from the archetypal perspective, then take action based on that. Believing that those who behave i…

In your last paragraph, you seem to rule out 2-3 separate approaches to moderation as non-conducive

1) We should have rules

2) We don't need rules

3) We should rely on moderator judgement

How do you think moderation should be approached, if not with rules or moderator judgement?

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#94

Post by wizzwizz4 »

squigz wrote: post #93
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making Hard Decisions to resolve larger disputes involving multiple people – this is usually a mistake because large disputes are often really hard to understand (so you usually end up picking a side, with that being the wrong side), and they normally fall into one of a handful of archetypes: it's better to analyse them from the archetypal perspective, then take action based on that. Believing that those who behave i…

In your last paragraph, you seem to rule out 2-3 separate approaches to moderation as non-conducive 1) We should have rules 2) We don't need rules 3) We should rely on moderator judgement How do you think moderation should be approached, if not with rules or moderator judgement?

I think that question would take a book to answer, and I'm not aware of anyone having written that book yet. (I'm certainly not the right person to write it.) It's not that hard to work this stuff out for yourself, but…

  Trust not your self; but your Defects to know,
  Make use of ev'ry Friend——and ev'ry Foe.
    A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
  There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
  And drinking largely sobers us again.
You can completely destroy a community if you've found some of the fundamental principles, but not those which counterbalance them. (And you don't even need a formal position of power to accomplish this.) It's this partial understanding that I was referring to, in that last paragraph. In the absence of a good book, I don't think a moderator can learn these things without good mentors, a rogues gallery, and many mistakes – but those mistakes can prove fatal without good mentors to fall back on.

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#95

Post by bookshed »

pizlonator wrote: post #4
TheFreim wrote: post #2

Explanation of the NixOS Steering Committee and NixOS Moderation Team ( https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1nrsu9c/nixos_modera... ): > The Nix Steering Committee (SC) ( https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/ ) is the elected community leadership body. It was established as part of the Nix governance constitution ( https://github.com/NixOS/org/blob/main/doc/constitution.md ) last year, after which…

This feels like a lot of political baggage for an open source project and a recipe for drama. Is any of this overhead really needed? What does it accomplish? (Serious question, maybe I’m just too dim to get it)

> Is any of this overhead really needed?

Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.

> What does it accomplish?

As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.

Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".

For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.

It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.

Oh! and this is not a LEFT vs. RIGHT problem. Here is a good read: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/bad-governments-on-the-left-...

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#96

Post by bbor »

refulgentis wrote: post #38
bbor wrote: post #11

HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing…

[flagged]

…I guess I’d just respond by saying that you should reacquaint yourself with the definitions of left vs right. It has nothing to do with what you mentioned.

I ask because the python debacle was indeed political — it was rooted in debates about DEI, what constitutes discriminatory speech, and other related issues.

No, I was not cheekily hoping to start a fight about politics.

Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as does my spellchecker. I don’t know what you hope to gain from nitpicking someone’s typos, but I encourage you to answer that question to yourself. Dare I say “nothing”?

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#97

Post by TiredOfLife »

bsimpson wrote: post #39

One of the reasons I stopped using Nix is how much more often I saw posts about political bickering than anything helpful. I'm not aware of any other open source project so consumed with virtue signal bikeshedding.

Ruby

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#98

Post by Mathnerd314 »

bhy wrote: post #53
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling o…

How does your private fork work? Does that mean some flakes and packages for your own use, or you maintain patches that touch deeper into the system?

The Nixpkgs repo is a Git repository. I forked the repository and I merge in updates using the normal git workflow. I've tried flakes and stuff, but none of them are as convenient as directly modifying files.

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#99

Post by refulgentis »

bbor wrote: post #96
refulgentis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

…I guess I’d just respond by saying that you should reacquaint yourself with the definitions of left vs right. It has nothing to do with what you mentioned. I ask because the python debacle was indeed political — it was rooted in debates about DEI, what constitutes discriminatory speech, and other related issues. No, I was not cheekily hoping to start a fight about politics. Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as doe…

I'm really curious: can you share these definitions of left and right?

> Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as does my spellchecker. I don’t know what you hope to gain from nitpicking someone’s typos, but I encourage you to answer that question to yourself. Dare I say “nothing”?

Geez, didn't know it hurt that much :) I'm 37 and still discover words I mis-spell and am grateful when people correct me. I get the need for us all to have a safe space but I didn't know the left went this far...

Re: NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee's interference

#100

Post by zahlman »

philodeon wrote: post #74
c0nducktr wrote: post #71

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?

You are not allowed to have a moderate opinion on gender representation in tech, and you are not allowed to have photos of steak on your NixOS discussion forum profile: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

> Srid states his opinion on the gender survey question under a topic titled “Nix Community Survey 2023 Results”. This response, a week later (see next point below), gets moved to a separate thread and gets unlisted (meaning, nobody can reach it without a direct link) by a moderator.

The problem is that communities want to have (or at least tolerate having) these demographic surveys in the first place. The easiest way to avoid identity politics drama is to avoid identity politics, and the easiest way to avoid identity politics is to minimize and discourage mention of identity. pg was right (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html).

Open source is for everyone. The OSI is abundantly clear about this. For any given project this means everyone in principle; there is no obligation to check whether you have collected all the identity Pokemon. If your group is small this is impossible and if it is large then it is either inevitable or a failure is not your fault (and trying to force the issue is in fact the discriminatory thing). Besides which, the identity Pokedex doesn't exist in the first place. Why even invite the argument about the categories that need to be considered?

You don't draw a circle by adding more sides. You draw it by using a damn compass.

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