That is fair.
I didn’t even notice details there.
It was just to give rough indication.
Deleted political compass, I agree it was a bit overkill.
But I would like to leave the first one.
Otherwise, I am not sure how else I can make a point with clarity.
Tim, why do not nominate yourself as new SC member? 
Not at all - have at it 
. In context, though, you seem to be implying that I was defending “old usenet culture”. But I wasn’t. We were debating how much moderation was appropriate in a “truly healthy community”.
That’s a difficult issue, and adults can disagree without rancor. But we agreed “old usenet culture” is unhealthy. But we also (I believe) agreed that there’s no such thing as “a right never to be offended”, and that it’s impossible to fabricate the illusion of such a right by force without destroying the community.
So there are tradeoffs. That’s really off-topic here, though.
I know how deeply you care about your communities, and something of your history that drives you to seek a better place to belong to. Which isn’t what people seem to be assuming:
At the risk of saying too much, you didn’t leave (3) because you wanted to be free to act like an ass, but because, among other things, you were ridiculed for suggesting that your wealthy employer and highly paid coworkers even consider embracing some altruism to do some good in the larger community.
I’ve known people working in the same general area, and they too left in disgust. But neither do they generally feel welcome here either. People are too eager to assume the worst possible reading. I’ll make a pitch instead for the principle of charity.
It’s something I always hoped to do, but reality hasn’t cooperated. I’m old now, and much more damningly my health is failing. I couldn’t commit to the time it would require. I don’t generally sign up for things in a half-assed way 
.
Just dealing with the crush of email from my suspension severely over-taxed my energy, leaving me on the edge of physical exhaustion. Doing a good job on SC duties would require at least as much work.
In younger days, I expect I would have thrived on it! Maybe @guido can dust off the old time machine
I did that here as well but instead quoting HN’s version. Should we formally adopt the principle we should refer to your link because it is official and also I want fewer people to know about HN to forestall tragedy of the commons
I think having this in our guidelines would greatly benefit our community.
I noted in my blog that I was applying a “reasonable person” test to analyze my claimed violations. Which requires some work in a few cases to spell out the “reasoning” I expect a “reasonable person” would follow.
But essentially nothing would need to be said under a “principle of charity” test. Almost none of those claims would even start to get off the ground.
In an older pre-ban topic I asked what (if any) standard was used by the PSF for judging claimed violatings. No reply.
In any case, since we’re obviously far from applying “principle of charity” standards, you should really edit your post, to delete everything about “political compasses”.
People will read that stuff in ways you didn’t intend. As an old election-theory nerd myself, I like that kind of analysis. But it’s not helpful here…
Did you miss the part where I explained it’s a bad idea to bring this up, and later the post was removed by the author? This is entirely off topic here.
Edited, however I thought it’s good to use opportunities to share paradigms of thought that would be broadly interesting.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite clear with my recommendation but I’m not talking at all about the alleged violations. Rather, I’m talking about members of our community who might never escalate complaints if that was in the guidelines.
Since we’re not operating under a principle of charity, that was doomed to create actionable offense. You & I could have a good time discussing it, but I’m neither easily offended nor looking for offense Neither are you. In fact I spend more time on private mailing lists now, where universal presumption of good faith is a lubricant that prevents minor offenses from chafing. If someone does take offense, they point it out and it essentially never escalates beyond a brief public apology.
We haven’t adopted the principle of charity explicitly there either, but it’s at work anyway. My true belief is that the Golden Rule is the foundation of all compassionate codes of human conduct, and the principle of charity is mostly “just” an application of that.
Sure, that was clear. I was giving my blog as an example of what arguments look like under the harsher “reasonable person” test. That’s all. Concrete examples can be very helpful to people who haven’t thought much about this kind of stuff before.
Beyond that, people respond to incentives. If the PSF did embrace the principle of charity, people who didn’t apply that when raising a flag would soon enough learn that worst-possible readings won’t be “rewarded” by seeing the offender silenced. They could then be guided to what “principle of charity” means in real life, and learn accordingly. Or not.
Of course that cuts both ways: we’re also required then to assume the best possible interpretation for why someone flagged a post to begin with.
I don’t think there are any possible rules that would leave a mod’s job easy. I do think that it’s good that you and @dg-pb were confronted in public and given chances to edit your own posts. That has educational benefits for everyone. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” is a motto I may have mentioned before
No, not directly. I naturally made some assumptions and maybe exaggerated things a bit to make a point. To me it seemed that your preferences are influenced by it.
Let’s take another example.
Severity of an insult/inappropriate behaviour from 0 to 10. (0) is neutral, objective, impersonal statement, such as “I like cherries.”. (10) is the worst possible insult in public space.
From what I have gathered, knowing you, I don’t believe you have breached anything higher than (2-3), given it was properly scrutinised by “professionals”.
And naturally, you are not happy with conclusions of and consequences.
At the same time, I have presented a case to you which in my eyes was closer to (4-5) and you didn’t see a big problem there.
So it seems that you are willing to tolerate more severe disharmonies than me.
But that is natural that people have different preferences. And I don’t think either of us are hypocritical here.
But here is a situation that breaks Golden Rule.
What if half of the people wanted culture to be at (2) and the other half at (8)? And none were hypocritical. I.e. Everyone was ok to be treated in the same manner as they are treating others.
Now my issues with status quo is that no one seemed seemed to care much when I tried to bring the case of (4-5), but your case of (2-3) was quite severely punished. This is double standard.
So I mainly see 2 dimensions here:
Of course, application of the above is completely separate question. But I think it is good to agree on above first before starting to apply/enforce. This way those who have different preferences are well informed and can adapt.
In contrast, prevalent “overarching” rule “be reasonable” is:
I think it is in the same class of other common phrases in this community, such as “you need to prove to us and not other way round”.
Someone has said it 1st time when it was appropriate and sensible. I.e. all counter-arguments were clearly laid out and person still refuses to take them into account.
Then, many others just went on using them as winning arguments where situation was drastically different.
I.e. Used it instead of responding with constructive counter-arguments.
Wasn’t exactly like that. I was referring more to prevalent culture than events that happened. I think I have failed to convey it accurately to you with my brief mention of it. The point is that the culture was very competitive (in a bad way) and aggressive.
I’m not going to continue this here, because it’s really off-topic. I’ll just add that Golden Rule isn’t about what people want to see, but about how they themselves want to be treated. I really don’t think there’s all that much difference among people. For example, essentially nobody wants to be libeled or insulted, and essentially everyone likes a friendly word.
One thing they may differ on is whether they enjoy being the target of good-natured ribbing. I do, and so it’s hard to always keep in mind that others don’t.
For example, David Mertz recently posted this jab at me on Facebook:
I’m going to get a bumper sticker saying “Tim Peters thinks I explain in too much detail!”
It’s funny because it’s true: both that he does go into too much detail at times, and that I’m supremely guilty of that at times. There’s no offense taken at such things among friends, just appreciation.
My sincere apologies for the misrepresentation then. But clearing that up is way off-topic here. It’s not that it’s not a worthy conversation to have, it’s just “wrong time & place” for it. I hope you’ll agree.
I certainly sympathize @brettcannon . There seems to be a dozen of new messages every day in this topic, which is certainly too much given what little new information they bring to the table. Is there perhaps an extra-slow mode that can be enabled?
I don’t want to see this thread in the email summary.
Can someone tweak the discourse algorithm, please?
Some info I should have given before: I didn’t message Łukasz out of the blue. He wrote to me first, with a very gracious and highly appreciated more personal note, related to something on my blog. My reply was more “… and while we’re here …”.
This was on Facebook, where we’ve been “Facebook friends” for years. I wouldn’t have initiated the contact. “Golden Rule”. While I don’t recall us ever having a major dispute, and have always had a favorable impression of him, I don’t think we had material collaboration on a project before either. So no real personal connection to presume on to justify a “stiff discussion”. It was justified more by building on the theme of putting a community’s interest above one’s own that he raised first.
I don’t send spam to random strangers
Let’s fix that.
Collaborative projects are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
There’s a new article on LWN. It’s behind a paywall for the next 2 weeks, but the author (Jake Edge) gave me a “secret link” that bypasses the paywall, and I have his permission to share it here:
Tim Peters returns to the Python community [LWN.net]
Jake and I did not collaborate. He shared the link with me today after it was published, which is the first I heard of it.
Jake earlier wrote the best, by far, news story about “the ban”: