The most robust law power systems today are based on the separation of 3 powers.
Legislative is the power to set the law. Judiciary is the power to declare sanctions based on the law. Executive is the power to apply sanctions. In practice, there is also an administrative power that applies “constraints”. Without a clear separation between these, power abuses or corruption might raise, more so as the community becomes larger.
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I agree. The more pressing question in my mind concerns the relationship between the individuals who make those decisions and the individuals who are governed by those decisions. The decisions can be made in secret, in a bubble, based on criteria that are not only unquantified but entirely unknown, with unknown kinds of feedback that may or may not be happening in private; or they can be made in a transparent manner, in open dialogue with the community, with feedback that is clearly two-way, so that everyone can see what decisions are being made, and how, and the relevant judgments can evolve over time in a way that is not only healthy and robust but whose health and robustness is publicly apparent. I can tell you which one of those ways I think is better and I can tell you which one we have here and I can tell you that those two are not the same.
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I’ve been online for over a quarter of a century at this point, and every forum I’ve used in that time has had at the very least the ability for moderators to remove offending posts and, for the vast majority of them, the ability to redact offending sub-parts of a post while leaving the rest standing.
So I’m not really sure why people are so continually surprised to learn that a piece of forum software here in the mid-2020s has those capabilities, or get so worked up about it (as I recall during the run up to last year’s PSF election, one person suggested that these capabilities, which have been table stakes for forum software for decades, ought to be made literally illegal).
I am not generally pleased to be saying that anything useful came out of the public furore surrounding a certain incident at PyCon 2013, but at least one useful thing did come out of it: we saw what it actually looks like when a conduct issue is litigated in full public view with everyone “participating”.
And I, for one, do not think it was a superior approach to cases being handled with discretion and with protection for the privacy of the parties involved (also, I am not convinced that the type of public litigation of moderation decisions being asked for could be carried out in a manner consistent with the privacy laws of several jurisdictions in which PSF members live).
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Did this happen somewhere in this thread?
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The full quote was (emphasis added to show the part omitted above):
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I apologise if I seemed worked up in the post you quoted - I didn’t mean to give that impression. If you have a suggestion for a better way to word it feel free to share I suppose. Was the bit about being surprised about forum software capabilities just thrown in for flavour? I’m struggling to understand its relevance otherwise.
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I’m hoping not to get drawn into this discussion much further, so suffice it to say: Even supposing that the details of individual incidents aren’t litigated publicly (which I agree they need not and often should not be), more general principles of how such things are handled still can be discussed publicly, and often should be. Members of a community cannot feel welcome and included unless that community has principles and an ethos that the members support and buy into; and they cannot know whether or not they support the community’s principles unless they know what those principles are and (crucially!) how they are implemented. There must always be sufficient transparency for people to make an informed judgment on the community they’re a part of — how they feel about it, whether they think it’s healthy, whether they like the direction things are going, etc. Even if some things have to be handled in private, a general ethos of transparency and dialogue fosters trust, satisfaction, and cohesion in a community, while an ethos of secrecy and stonewalling fosters suspicion, resentment, and division.
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During the period before last year’s election, people certainly did seem to be both surprised and extremely upset by the fact that moderators could remove or redact posts. I made similar comments at the time about how long that’s been a standard part of forum software.
Python’s Code of Conduct is a public document. The action taken against the person mentioned in this thread was publicly announced and the reasoning given, and the moderators mentioned they are working on ways to handle situations where an issue comes up during election time without creating the appearance of interfering in the election.
I’m not sure what else you think needs to be aired publicly beyond that. And speaking for myself, I feel I have all the information I need to judge whether I like the direction the moderators of this forum are taking.
At a certain point, it stops feeling like wanting “transparency” and more like wearing down through endless requests to re-justify, re-litigate, re-consider until finally the moderators just give up and give in to make it stop.
I also don’t think it’s particularly helpful to choose the framing of “secrecy and stonewalling”, especially in light of how much information about the case at hand is available to you, publicly, in this very thread.
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Over 40 years here, but I won’t hold your inexperience against you 
.
I’m not clear on what “forum” means to you. d.p.o., right here, is the first time I ever saw a forum with those kinds of abilities. Usenet had extensive facilities for hiding what you didn’t want to see, but everyone had to roll their own (by crafting “killfiles”). GNU Mailman (on which the Python-related mailing lists ran) had essentially no moderation abilities (if you configured it to hold posts for review, the admin could kill off a post unsent, but after it was sent, there was no way to get rid of it short of involving IT staff to manually edit the underlying message store).
Perhaps your background isn’t universal? It has little in common with mine, for example. Although I do recall an early small church “bulletin board” system that was keen on heavy moderation.
That line of argument ended last year, and incorporated into d.p.o.'s “Community Guidelines”:
Moderators will not edit post content, only formatting, links, and confusing typos (like “pypy” vs “PyPI”)
While “members of the community” did push for that, it didn’t get anywhere until a SC member publicly endorsed it. So, to my eyes, not on principle but a result of social dynamics among “insiders”.
Well said! “Just trust us” is the heart of rule-by-people, Worked fine when we had A BDFL. But it doesn’t scale, and trust once lost is very hard to regain.
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I should clarify that much of my concern here is not about this particular ban. My first post in this thread was:
There has been no response to that. I and others made similar points during the tense discussions that happened several months ago (e.g., this one, which also received no or minimal response. That’s the gist of my concerns.
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In the late 1980s, a researcher at CERN developed a new thing which he called the “World Wide Web”, based on what he termed a “HyperText Transfer Protocol”, which could be used to distribute documents written in a “HyperText Markup Language”. Of course, very little came of that, and it’s had next to no impact on the world and remained quite niche, so it would be understandable if someone’s not heard of this. But nonetheless I think you’ll find that dedicated hobbyists wrote several pieces of software which could output this markup language and use this protocol, some of which were analogous, in their general purpose, to the obviously more universally familiar everyday NNTP newsgroups. I can find, for example, administrator manuals from the 2000s carved with mysterious runes which decode as “P H P B B” , mentioning the ability of moderators and administrators to remove or redact “posts”.
Do you think it counts as “reaching out to the community” if you, personally, are not asked for your individual input and/or that input is not acted upon?
I ask because, despite hundreds of posts and thousands of words, last year the most contentious of the bylaw changes still passed with a supermajority of votes cast being in favor of it, and this is a useful reminder that sometimes one’s personal views are not shared as widely as one would like. If “the community” overall were to clearly express a preference that you disagree with, would you be prepared to accept that?
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… that only a very small subset of people have the power to vote.
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And? Your background is not universal. For example, i never used a phpBB system.
Nobody kept pushing on the bylaws topic. Not even me. I never mentioned it again after the deadline for affirming intent to vote arrived. And I always expected it would pass by a landslide. BFD. I strongly doubt you’ll find anything from @BrenBarn either going on about it. Or from anyone else. That “controversy” ended before the vote started.
If you’re looking for an example of people refusing to accept the result of a vote, that ain’t it.
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phpBB wasn’t the only piece of software that allowed moderators to remove or redact posts.
And I could just as easily argue that your experience, which apparently consisted solely of NNTP and mailing lists until the day you first posted on this web-based forum, is not exactly universal either. And if we were to ask which is the more representative experience of the past couple decades of online discussion, I think web-based forums, which often have moderation tools that can change the set of visible posts or their contents after posting, would come out on top.
I’m simply asking what would be considered an acceptable level of “reaching out to the community”. I think it’s pretty well established that the most voluminous posters on this forum do not represent the most common opinions of, say, the voting PSF members (to take one example).
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Of course;. I’m aware of such things, I simply have no experience of them.
Pretty much, yes,
Of course it isn’t. But I wasn’t the one expressing puzzlement over that others don’t view things the same way as I do.
“Universal” meant what it said. I’m not on about majoritarianism here. A healthy international community needs tolerance for many backgrounds and experiences. I don’t care what’s “popular”.
Start with “more than none”? There is 0 dialog and total stonewalling now.
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As a former moderator on a Reddit subreddit, (1M), and a moderator on a Discord community (400k) and who is on a deeply needed sabbatical, the granularity of moderation tools on this forum is very good.
I have a few gripes centered on the fact that it shows who has been suspended or had comments removed. This is because it forces the moderated person to publicly either admit wrong, or double down. I think growth should be allowed to be quiet if the individual so chooses, or their position should be something they affirm in their own way, voice, and time.
Public viewing of the moderated, and its impact of permanently tying someones identity to a moment of a post on some online forum isn’t a great thing in my experience.
(I don’t mind people keeping records, but I like it to preserve sincerity. Using personal records to keep something inflammatory in its inflammatory status, however, is destructive and deserving of moderation. Granted, if you want to move from the forum to your personal blog that’s fine. And, if you’ve created a 50 comment thread where you are all but 5 comments it’s probably a sign that your thread may be better suited for a personal blog.)
So while I’m not actually answering your question, hopefully it adds a perspective regarding your question of what “forum”[‘s] are out there.
@tim.one I would love for you to elaborate on what could be improved on regarding moderation actions taken, why, and evidence behind your ideas of what is the better course.
Regarding Franz, it was visibly a tough decision to balance ensuring a platform was equally offered, while trying to remove the code of conduct violating insults that were present in the same posts which contained platform information.
What did the moderation team do wrong? What should have been done? Given your thread on analyzing the PSF Board election votes: you’re familiar with academics. Are there papers which address your moderation ideals in a supportive, evidence based fashion? What kinds of papers cite the ones you use as supporting evidence?
You have this needling stab of, “Oh the PSF says just trust us”, but I’ve yet to see examples of what should be done. Particularly absent has been structural suggestions in anything you’ve said save discussions of voting structures, which you (at present) protected yourself from responsibility by saying, “After all this, don’t trust the algorithms I’ve suggested”. Simply sewing distrust, but refusing to own anything impactful.
From my experience moderating, if I say something hateful, or targetedly hateful/reductive/unfounded, while also saying something of my platform in the same sentence: it is difficult to choose between full removal, or subsecting removal of the comment that violated the CoC. It gets increasingly difficult to address when there are comments replying to the CoC violating section which are made prior to when I get a chance to moderate.
A portion of moderation is understanding the volatility of the community at a given point in time. and that means responding to certain behaviors differently: often the words in a post is not the focus of some individuals, but the impact they cause: ie some folks just want a flame war. And as such, the impact necessarily varies based on the community climate.
To make an analogy: A cold front means significantly less to the plain states of the US in the middle of winter compared to the late spring.
Moderators, similarly, need to look at what replies to a comment could be and understand how the same comment could cause different reactions at different times.
If the community, like d.p.o., is focused on developing the future of python: petty flame wars are probably not something which should be hosted there.
You have your personal blog, your voice exists. But putting something hateful/divisive in a space which has a goal of collaboration means alienating a lot of potential collaborators.
From that, in a climate of volatility (even a manufactured one by a single or couple of voices), it means recognizing that in cases where the last weeks of conversations on this topic which have only served to create a divide, and not sway anyone in a hegelian process, are topic spaces which only harm a community developing a project. At some point in the future it’s often worth revisiting a topic to explore nuance, but in a volatile time that nuance is often not accessible given the heated nature of emotions.
How do you propose we fix this? At present, I have no means to measure what people want besides a vote. Those who vote are probably the folks who have a vested interest in the community, so while it may be a small subset of folks who can vote, it’s probably a core representation of those who care about the community, and aren’t here for the cryptocurrency that python enables. Sorry, NFTs. Sorry, GPTs. Sorry, LLMs.
If there are demographics this is missing: please outline them. I desperately want to make an argument for nominating PSF Contributing Membership by *Nomination*. So any insight into my blind-spots is very important.
Building from that, I’ve suggested PSF membership changes, and python .org infrastructure changes. And I’d adore being comfortable suggesting such changes on a larger public scale. But I, in full sincerity, do not want to propose, or navigate further conversations here after a year of watching this forum.
Tim: you are directly why I don’t like talking here. While you are smart, and I am itching to talk about voting coverage and other mechanisms with you. (“Term frequency, inverse document frequency” is a topic space which I would enjoy watching your perspective in regarding covering voting weights for ‘out groups’.) Your presumptive attitude towards many things, including this:
Which feels very similar in ‘familiarity’ to:
Where you Direct Messaged me, I never replied, but you framed your very public comment as if we had a private correspondence.
This forces me to feel uncomfortable bringing up anything because I am conscious of the opportunity of an attempt to reframe (intentionally or not) fragments of some one sided conversations if it suits you.
This thread is suppose to be focused on the suspension of Franz, and I feel the implementation of his suspension was only delayed due to his candidacy for the PSF board. If there’s discrepancy regarding those circumstances, and the moderation action that was taken, it would help to clearly lay out the issue.
I struggle to frame your engagement here regarding that core goal to address the topic at hand.
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Having only a small subset able to vote isn’t a problem to be fixed, but I am pointing out that then claiming “look, the vote went overwhelmingly this way” - as has been done multiple times - is mostly meaningless.
“One out of one Roman dictators decreed that you should be thrown to the lions. Come on, the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of it!”
When you have a system whereby the bylaw can be changed on the basis of a specific subset, pointing to the fact that this subset wanted the bylaw to be changed just means that, well, that subset wanted the bylaw to be changed. It means absolutely NOTHING about reaching out to the community.
Why do you believe that? On what basis do you believe that the ones with voting rights are representative of the community?
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Sorry, I haven’t been following this. May I ask who you are speaking on behalf of? (Who’s “we”?) The SC, PSF, CoC WG or the moderator team on d.p.o.?
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Ok, do you think your personal rephrasing of what other people said is actually bringing something to the discussion?
“You said A but it feels to me like B” is just derailing. You may sincerely think it but it has no value, especially in an already contentious discussion.
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The @moderators.
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