Chandler Carruth

Been mulling something... (No, this is not actually a sub-toot) Not sure I have it _quite_ articulated well yet, but getting close... Here is my current best attempt...

I think one thing that really misses the mark in culture efforts, inclusivity efforts, and things like codes-of-conduct for organizations & companies is trying to replicate the approach taken by government/state structures.

For example, using legalistic language to try and establish precision of wording in a CoC. Or structuring moderation rules or response policy as-if rules of law and governments. Or demand "adjudication" of moderation/CoC claims with an innocent unless proven guilty, shadow of a doubt, precise evidentiary rules, etc.

Fundamentally, the context here is critically _different_, and trying to apply the approach of one to the other is a mistake. In both directions.

Open source communities, even companies, are not sovereign states. They do not employ an armed police force or military to backstop their rules. If the state decides "you may not say that", they mean, "you may not say that and live as part of this state". And that determination is backed by the threat of violence. The state and the government _should_ be held to the highest possible standard. Judging someone guilty of a crime and enforcing it through state-backed violence of incarceration had _better_ be innocent until proven guilty, and proven with the highest standard of evidence, oversight, and rigor.

Getting banned from an open source community, or even being fired from a hot-shot tech job is _incredibly_ different. That's not to say that either of these is an inconsequential event -- they can be very consequential. And so folks I think feel motivated to push them to the higher standard. But we also need to be realistic, as these are not state-violence backed judgements. This is not the literal forced removal of your freedom or life. This is at _most_ the loss of an especially lucrative career that must be replaced with a categorically less lucrative career. And that's the worst case. Most moderation decisions are _hilariously_ less consequential. And it's entirely reasonable to use a less consequential process to arrive at them.

Mar 27 at 6:30amWeb
Show threadStephen Crane1d ago
@chandlerc Very much agree. Particularly for the open source and community contexts, leadership and moderation should include setting a culture of safety and inclusion. Setting that cultural expectation is so much more important than “official processes.” The risk of allowing bad behavior to persist is that it will become normalized, which is a much worse outcome for a community than losing an individual’s contributions.
Show threadmodulux1d ago

@chandlerc First off, I think you're essentially right that the standard should be different. Not only because the consequences are different, but because the capacity to investigate and adjudicate a claim is diffrent too (the state has special organs for this).

That said, I'd push back on two aspects.

First, the notion that losing employment is trivial or unimportant. There's good research on how harmful this is, and in general, many jurisdictions have tenure of employment as a right, requiring proper grounds for dismissal. I think any dilution of this stance is dangerous, because if you can dismiss someone without sufficient cause in one instance, you can do so for less justifiable reasons.

Second, I think it's important to consider that this happens in the context of communities, where people can do irrational and adversarial things. Norms can be instrumentalised by bad actors if there aren't sufficient safeguards. (I could provide examples, not in free software, but regarding similar contexts.)

Show threadChandler Carruth1d ago

@modulux

First, you can't "push back" on the notion that losing employment is trivial or unimportant. From my post: "That's not to say that either of these is an inconsequential event -- they can be very consequential." -- pretty freaking clear that I'm not calling this trivial or unimportant.

Personally, I actually disagree about grounds for dismissal, but very explicitly only in a context with credible UBI. The absence of which I agree complicates the matter. But I don't think there is a "right" to a career that includes inherently high-trust interactions with other humans. That kind of career is inherently a social contract rather than a fundamental right. But we don't have UBI in any interesting context, and so that makes everything horribly complicated. But _none_ of these positions are "trivial" or "unimportant", and I was very explicit about that in my post.

To your second point, the existence of bad actors or the ability of bad actors to manipulate a system is _completely_ orthogonal and irrelevant to the point I'm making. It's also hilariously blown out of proportion -- every piece of actual evidence (as opposed to anecdote) clearly shows that bad-faith actions are a sharp minority of the already small fraction of _any_ kind of bad behavior.

Show threadRandy Smith1d ago

@chandlerc Hmmm. I don't hear you as factoring in the human experience of being in community and being ostracized from it. I think that fear, and the pain of it happening, goes fairly deep. I'm not sure if factoring it in would change your reasoning much, but I wouldn't leave it out of your thinking. At a minimum, I think people will still react very strongly negatively to the threat of ostracization, possibly even more so than the thread of criminal prosecution.

Having said that, I totally see the reluctance to ostracize as being weaponized by bad actors. And I have appreciated the culture on Bluesky of "Don't engage, just block", which is basically ostracization, if of a much smaller kind than blocking someone from an open source community.

Show threadChandler Carruth1d ago

@curiouserrandy I feel like I tried to directly address that fear:

"""
That's not to say that either of these is an inconsequential event -- they can be very consequential. And so folks I think feel motivated to push them to the higher standard.
"""

And in _this_ post, I'm not trying to address this fear being weaponized (agree it is, and that's a big problem, just not for this post).

All I'm trying to highlight that the standard we reach for to address this fear shouldn't be the _same_ standard that we use for state-backed "ostracization" of incarceration and physical violence. The standard that is used there is probably not well optimized for addressing the real, but categorically lower, risks of ostracization from an OSS community or collection of work colleagues.

And when we *do* reach for that higher standard, it gives IMO a very damaging impression of conflating these two risks as of a similar magnitude. But banning you from an online space is very different from physical assault, hand cuffing, and incarceration. =/

Show threadRandy Smith1d ago

@chandlerc No argument with any of what you say. And I solidly agree with your basic point, that the standards that are appropriate in the legal world, that are backed by the state monopoly on violence, aren't the right standards for how to manage ostracization in other communities.

But my gut is that the consequences are different in type, not, or not just, in degree. And that feels like it needs to be incorporated as well. Fines and incarceration by the legal system may not alienate you from your community (there's at least one case in my community were it emphatically hasn't), and I believe we're hard wired to be concerned about our relationship with our communities in a different way than our freedom and finances.

Show threadChandler Carruth1d ago

@curiouserrandy

Yeah, there is a type difference....

But I think I've skipped over another aspect. The rules and processes of state-backed laws and such are also optimized _for the most extreme_ versions of the state-monopoly on violence. We don't really have a legal system well tuned to handling fines and such. Don't get me started on how we respond to property damage or theft .... It's pretty nonsensical all around.

But if you look at _dramatically_ violent responses enabled by laws like life-long incarceration in a way untethered to human rights and dignity.... all of a sudden, many aspects of the process make more sense. (Not all of them, but some. And more in their ideas than the practical realities. There is a long critique of legal systems that is warranted but off topic here.)

The result is that the structures and approach to establishing culpability are skewed somewhat wildly toward enabling .... rather extreme forms of reprisal, that I think also preclude a complete inversion due to the perception differences of the different types of response.

And my whole point here is to encourage communities is to avoid reaching for these excessively strong and ultimately self-defeating standards of operating when setting up things like moderation. Instead, embrace a more practical, simple, and judgement-call oriented approach. Because the stakes, while high, are worlds different from the stakes that legalistic mechanisms optimize for: literally violent destruction of every aspect of your life.

Show threadRandy Smith11h ago
@chandlerc Yup, that all makes sense to me. It's a tricky space.
Show threadMatthew Skala1d ago

@chandlerc I think part of the problem is that the free software community is accustomed to thinking in terms of software, and of copyright licenses. Both of those push thinking in the direction of having codified rules, and thinking that such rules are both necessary and sufficient to achieve cultural goals - because that's how software works, and it's how copyright licenses purport to work.

The libertarian current of "all law is contract law, and we can write our own" doesn't help either.