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.
@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"...
@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.)
Filippo Valsorda
Glyph
✧✦Catherine✦✧
JP
lynn
yuubi