Comment by pxc
1 year ago
> The moderation team is disempowered to ban people for driving away many more contributors worth of time than they have contributed themselves if they don’t violate any rules on paper.
So the demand is that the moderation team can ban people without them having violated any rules? And on what basis is the volume of these theoretical, possible future contributions based? This is a demand to ban people (prolific contributors) from the community based on vibes.
I've been in online communities like that. It's ridiculous to think something like that is appropriate for a sizeable open-source community. That kind of shit is for tiny, insular Facebook groups, subreddits, fediverse instances, etc. You don't see it so much at larger scales for good reason.
> Eelco has publicly liked several posts explicitly supporting Anduril on Discourse, likes which are visible under posts, and as someone with significant social power, can easily be seen as an endorsement of his personal view. This is unbecoming conduct of a board member and damages the unity of the board on decisions. You may browse his likes on Discourse.
This letter wants to talk about psychological safety, but concerns itself with policing social media likes. Seriously? I have no words.
This post was linked in the open letter, it explains pretty well why "don't violate any rules on paper" is insufficient: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
That's not a case for rule-free bans, but for writing better rules-- including, if necessary, rules that are broad, flexible, require substantial interpretation, etc.
And that doesn't address the entire first part here:
> The moderation team is disempowered to ban people for driving away many more contributors worth of time than they have contributed themselves
The contributor-hour estimation doesn't exist. (I struggle to imagine how it even could.) It's a rationalization which has come up because the most prominent person they want to ban is a consistent, prolific, long-time contributor and they need to say something to make it seem like his participation is a loss for the community as a whole.
It seems like what they really want is arbitrary bans of political opponents.
Those broad rules were proposed and rejected on the basis of being too broad. That is exactly what the mentions of "concern trolling" are about, and as that is an effective way of preventing any change to the structure that would allow to drive those people out, this cycle has continued for months, if not years.