I wish we had spaces to collaborate on technical work where being a jerk was just not allowed. Like, actual proper fearless moderation.
Your reply starts with "No." on its own line? Two weeks ban. Learn to behave.
You go on a tear about another participant? One year ban. No warning.
I'm a privileged white dude with 20k followers and even I hesitate to contribute to some spaces because of the mailing list hand-to-hand combat.
Imagine how many contributions by talented folks we are wasting!
@glyph @filippo i've thought about this quite a bit. and while i'm partial to the idea (i think this kind of space would get pretty popular!), i explicitly chose to not go this way when writing the Glasgow CoC.
this is because this type of moderation is tone policing, and while it's probably fine to do tone policing when the only thing at a stake is minutae of technical detail, this is less true when your technical work affects the wellbeing of real people, who may be upset about it
@whitequark @glyph I see the risk in theory, but I can't remember from my experience a jerk in IETF-like spaces who was a legitimately upset stakeholder rather than a dude with opinions.
FWIW I think gish gallops should also get moderated brutally. I am not asking for politeness, I am asking for subjective moderation action that matches what everyone is saying in the parallel emotional support group chats.
@filippo @glyph an example of where this risk has played out in practice is the Nix project governance, where quite a few people were unhappy about close ties to defense among other things, some of whom were then banned (temporarily or permanently) for expressing that on procedural grounds
I would not want even the slightest suggestion of the idea that this would repeat in any place I moderate
value mismatch != wrong; if you equate the two you will lose the people who care about the distinction (either due to their approach to communication, or because e.g. they believe communities that claim that other values are wrong by fiat are likely to be/become hostile).
For banning for value mismatch not to seem arbitrary the values have to be clearly visible to everyone (incl. bystanders), too. whitequark's codes of conduct are IMO an example of being very clear on them.
@glyph @whitequark oh 100%
However, I'd be fine with a policy of "it's not the moderators' job to educate you, either take this spontaneously as a learning opportunity, or leave".
@filippo @glyph I'm undecided on this. I acknowledge the difficulty of educating people (do I have time for it in this context? no, usually I have negative amounts of time for it), but also implicitly expecting everyone in a culturally diverse community to behave in a way you implicitly expect seems like it would just enforce a different type of homogenity
to be clear, I'm not saying this is universally bad. I've had guys defend transphobia to me with "I'm from $country and what is this"...
@filippo @glyph personally, I feel like the core of the problem is that the cost for anyone to start participating in the shared process is essentially zero, but the cost of this participation _to others_ can be anywhere from negative (i.e. benefit) to basically infinity
I wonder if the way we've been structuring communities has been too open for its own good
@whitequark @filippo @glyph very much this
I’ll readily admit it’s a thorny problem (because obvs we can’t offload that onto every project/lead), probably needs some kind of community-reference solution (and *even that* gets hard, because cultural localisation), but.. yeah
by way of example: talking about adhd across most of africa is still wholesale anathema. in many same countries, being trans or queer is a death sentence. telling someone “go learn yourself” is ~= “gfy”
@froztbyte @filippo @glyph yeah. the way I approached it is: I decided that I will take the risk of having a Western-style cultural homogenity in order to get the reward of not having people who act transphobic. will I ban some people who genuinely just don't understand? yeah, absolutely. is it unfair? yep. do I consciously choose to make it their problem anyway? also yep
but I don't think this is necessarily reasonable to apply across the board. I just hate transphobia.
@whitequark This is a problem I've run into too. It doesn't help that many languages have one singular third person pronoun (sometimes with some recent gendered distinguish in how it's written or displayed), and so a lot of people will default to "he" for no ill intent whatsoever.
It's not something I know how to solve! It's something I can bear (as a shambling aspirational Chinese speaker) but can't reasonably expect others to.
Just to add context to this:
Chinese has 他, 她 and 它 for he/she/it.* This is only ~100 years old! Before, there was just 他.
The're pronounced all the same ("ta"), and written in pinyin (the romanization and also how Chinese is typed online) all the same. Further, "ta" is taught to translate to "he" by default, (and it is a far lesser faux pas to refer to a woman as "he" than it is to refer to her as "it".)
(*Myriad tiny exceptions, and myriad debated newer pronouns.)
@dysfun just to make sure, we are talking about this comment, right? https://github.com/appmattus/certificatetransparency/issues/143#issuecomment-2994457681
If so, I am perfectly at peace with what I wrote and how and I stand by it. We can agree to disagree, no need to debate it, just want to make sure you're referring to that.
@filippo I think you'd first have to solve the question of what constitutes "being a jerk" unambiguously.
Empirically, roughly half the people talking about my online behavior tell me they admire my superhuman patience and stoic politeness.
The other half tells me I'm an insufferable asshole.
I think what you'd get in practice would be a space where people get banned unpredictably and arbitrarily based on whatever mood or opinion whoever moderates right now is in. Which isn't welcoming either.
> you'd first have to solve the question of what constitutes "being a jerk" unambiguously
That's one way to do it. Many spaces try to do it that way. We already have those spaces.
I specifically want a space where a human, not an AI, not a rulebook, adjudicates.
They will get it wrong at times! Unfortunate but unavoidable.
The current system is not perfect either, it just picks false negatives over false positives.
@filippo I agree, but it's also tough (for reasons too nuanced to fit well into 500 characters. Some rare times "No" will be the right response, who does bans and how, etc.)
But I think it works best when you build a critical mass of people who already share the same values. But I'm trans and have only seen that in exclusively-trans spaces, which tend to lean towards the values of Don't Be Mean. But that is also antithetical to an open collaborative space.
To clarify, I think making better online spaces is a difficult problem that won't be "solved", let alone ever be defined in any way approaching rigorous.
But moderating is still something that has so much room for improvement in practically every technical space that we're still in the "low hanging fruit" phase
@filippo Tone policing only serves the oppressor.
A firm rejection of untruth is critical for building anything in reality.
But, yeah, ad hominems should be a public time-out.
@filippo I was flamed by a jerk yesterday (ad hominem) when the entire message signal he needed to convey was “that can’t be it because the decision would have preceded the cause you cited”.
He clearly wants me to stop participating (it’s a discussion not a project).
On reflection, it would have been great if a mod or high status man had explained that ad hominem attacks are never part of a good argument and that the community doesn’t tolerate those.
The fact is he chose to attack instead.
A 'No' with no reason or explanation deserves a harsher punishment.
That is just not contributing.
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