Suspension of Franz Király

PSF
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I’m in accord, not based on Deep Thoughts, but because I’ve always believed the Golden Rule is the foundation of all compassionate systems.

Nothing is really new here. I have long publicly opposed the seemingly calculated cruelty of the PSF’s “corrective actions”

And I’ve already spent too much of my life typing about it.. So, apologies, but I’m going to skip over most of your long post; I have nothing new to say.

Moderation isn’t “an interest” of mine. People want it, fine, at least be decent about it.

Concrete suggestions for improvements also aren’t new. I defer to @malemburg, who has been making them for years too. Marc-Andre was also a PSF founder, and has a keen mind for the human consequences of organizational structures. I can’t say his suggestions were rejected, but can say none were adopted. Because there’s no dialog, one can only speculate about why or why not.

His latest attempt (from last November) sputtered out. That had the much more limited goal of getting the Steering Council out of the “ban business”, which a majority of SC members at the time endorsed “at least in theory”. I may not always agree with him either, but “close enough”, He doesn’t believe there’s an “easy fix”, and neither do I.

Note that I’ve made no comment about Franz’s suspension. 18 months seems disproportional to the offenses to me, but so it goes.. At least they didn’t contrive a long list of hallucinatory specific “CoC violations” in an attempt at character assassination. I hope last year’s purges were the last of that we’ll see.

Yes, I know the topic title is about Franz. Human discussion is inherently discursive, and I’m happy to follow where things go.

?? I take full responsibility for endorsing Bloc STAR as “the best” method the PSF could adopt.

The topic about analyzing the PSF Board elections wasn’t about that, though. I think you’re misreading the last post I made there. It was pointing out an objective fact that may not be obvious: there is generally no way to shrink 13-dimensional data points to 2 dimensions that preserves all relative distances between points. That’s a fact. Blind trust in algorithms is indeed a Really Bad Idea™. So I explained the problem, and sketched what I did to assess how much damage was done. “Not much”. I didn’t try to “weasel out” of anything. Quite the contrary. Full disclosure, to the best of my ability.

Why didn’t you object at the time? I would have been been happy to make any clarifications you felt necessary.

While not always successful, I try to pick words with care.

In the case of Franz, “correspondence” was accurate: we exchanged many emails, over a period of weeks. While he since got it into his head that I’m some kind of secret agent conspiring with the PSF to discredit him (so very laughably off-base I can’t even begin to take offense), I strongly doubt he has any objections to my saying we corresponded.

In your case, I didn’t use 'correspondence", because we didn’t have one. I said something to you in private, which is all I claimed. Other things I could have said, but didn’t think useful at time:

  • This was via Discourse private DM.
  • You didn’t reply.
  • But I had no way to guess whether you ever would.
  • Discourse itself suggested I send you a DM.

In context, I was pointing out that this was at least the third time I was trying to get across the same point, and it would really be nice if there was some sign of progress :wink:.

Never my intent to “reframe” anything. If you like, I’ll post verbatim the DM I sent you, and your (lack of) reply. If you read my blog, you’ll see that I always provide links to public posts when possible, rather than “helpfully summarize” by supplying my own spin on what they said.

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I tried really hard here but the thread was locked down.

I agree with the skepticism; there are countless studies showing the opposite effect as well as notable real-life examples.

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Bless you for trying!

Give a read to the message posted when the topic was closed. It pointed to various things that supposedly “responded to” everything discussed - all of which were created before you started the topic. I suppose that could be taken as evidence of uncanny precognitive abilities.

Although Occam’s Razor suggests less fantastical mechanisms at work.

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Ah, I realize from rereading the thread I linked that some of my “please stick to the topic” messages seem out of place and I now remember what happened. The comments I was referring to were removed by the moderators although the content from what I remember was not very inflammatory (by my standards, so who knows) but definitely off-topic.

I reached out when the thread was closed and tried to get it reopened. I had a short exchange with one of the moderators (who is very kind and someone I appreciate) where they eventually said:

Unfortunately, due to the way some in the community have expressed themselves in recent topics, it’s really hard to approach in a way that remains appropriate and on topic here at this time, so we’ve made the decision to no longer hold discussions about it here.

This was definitely a bummer but then they reached out again:

I ended up getting another request from [REDACTED], and it made me reconsider a bit more. I do acknowledge that you’ve pushed back when people strayed off topic, and it was primarily discussing reasonable suggestions. So I’m a little more open to reopening it, but still really hesitant given the way things have been going regarding this in general. Do you have some sort of plan to say “I have enough feedback now, this is what I’m sending”? Where do you see the thread going? What should we do if it starts attracting more problematic posts than it already has?

I’ll wait to see what other mods have to say as well.

I found it very gracious of them to reconsider based on more community feedback, and the pragmatic inquiry of the next steps was a good idea. I responded with:

My plan was if I didn’t hear any more suggestions in that thread for two weeks that I would add a final comment summarizing what I think are action items and then in the same post ask for confirmation that what I said seems reasonable. After that, then I was going to send an email to whoever is in charge, which was also one of my questions in that thread.

That message of mine was the last correspondence. I was waiting for other moderators to chime in as mentioned but it never happened and I didn’t want to be a nuisance by following up.

I still don’t really know who is in charge or capable of making changes. Perhaps it was mentioned in the various threads but now I’ve forgotten. In the moderator exchange they mentioned toward the beginning:

I’d suggest emailing the CoC team or PSF directly if you want to propose a change and get their response on it.

So if folks here can confirm who exactly can enact changes I’m fine with spending a bit of free time to go through the plan as written i.e. aggregate the best suggestions in a dedicated thread, get feedback on the suggestions and then send off the email.

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Yes! That’s how “normal” human communications works. If A wants to be sure they understood B, A at least tries to paraphrase what B said, and asks B if they’re missing something material.

Oh, be a nuisance if you must. You can see how well that works for me :wink:.

Bingo.

The CoC WG is unelected, unappointed, self-selected, wrote the CoC, and is investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and (absence of) defense. Even in theory, they’re only accountable to the Board.

So they’re who you have to make a case to. The PSF appears to have evolved to the stage where essentially all operational authority ends with the Executive Director now (a position that wasn’t established in the bylaws, and intentionally not so at the time), and the Board appears to have been diminished to more of an “advisory” (to the ED) role.

From a current Board membe:

As a matter of social dynamics, little difference, since the ED is a member of both the Board and the CoC WG now.

As a matter of bureaucratic pecking order, the CoC WG appears to be the only entity whose views actually matter.

I wish you luck! Be aware in advance that even if they’re inclined to respond, it can take a very long time. They don’t meet often, or for long,

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BTW, that’s so very off topic here even I dropped it :wink:. Feel free to raise it in the topic analyzing the 2025 Board elections, where the “proportional representation surprise” turned out to be the major issue of investigation.

In brief, the “parallel” versions of Approval PR can viewed as treating raw number of approvals as a measure of TF, and the reciprocal of percentage of ballots approving of various pairs, triples, quads, … as a measure of IDF. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to view it that way, though.

But as noted there, reweighting ballots based solely on the ballots themselves is 100% blind to ideology or “intent”. If, e.g., for whatever reasons the candidates have surnames split between starting with A-M and N-Z, and voters happened to consist of 80% mostly approving of A-M candidates, and 20% of N-Z, about 20% of the winners would come from the N-Z group.

If, e.g., you want to give advantages to Lithuanians over Estonians regardless of what ballots say, that would require a different approach, including requiring candidates to declare their nationalities. That would offend my sense of fair play on several grounds, but, ya, I could certainly tweak Approval PR to achieve that end.

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I’m going to rephrase my question, because I think this and several other posts from other people are getting to the heart of what I really want to talk about. Here’s the question:

Are you (and this can be a general “you” directed at the multiple people who’ve replied to me, not just to Chris) prepared to accept and abide by the results of a process which includes community input and feedback (whether by voting or other mechanisms), but which sometimes nonetheless produces an outcome you personally disagree with?

Because what I see, over and over again, is not really a lack of opportunities for “the community” to offer input. What I see is a subset of people who voluminously argue one way, and then try to de-legitimize the process if it goes the other way.

For example: complaining that only a “subset” voted on the bylaw change. The controversial change affected the PSF Fellows, and every PSF Fellow had the right to vote on the bylaw change. Putting it up for extended public debate, and then holding a vote in which every affected person gets a vote, is about as inclusive a process as can be imagined. It’s not being re-litigated here in this thread because affected people were somehow excluded from the process, it’s being re-litigated here in this thread because some folks didn’t like the outcome of the process.

And this is the core thing I keep coming back to: any community needs a decision process, and needs the ability for that decision process to produce decisions. And it needs people to be willing to abide by those decisions even in the cases where they disagree with the decision made. The PSF’s decision process is to put big questions to the voting members, and smaller questions to its Board of Directors (who in turn are elected by the voting members). As processes go, that’s a pretty common one and generally accepted to be a pretty reasonable one (especially since voting membership is not difficult to obtain for someone who’s sufficiently interested). Yet I see, over and over, what I can only describe as attacks on the legitimacy of that process, not because it genuinely lacked opportunities for community input, but simply because it produced an outcome someone disagreed with.

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I suggest you’re severely overstating that. Mine was by far the most active voice questioning the wisdom of the bylaws change, but I stopped saying anything about it before the vote even started. The vote turned out the way I thought it would (in fact, it got a bit more opposition than I expected), and that’s fine by me.

The second most active was David Mertz, and he never said anything about it again either (while he can no longer post here, I know for a fact that he also let go of it).

There is still a trace of residual dissent to be found, sure. But you’re exaggerating it beyond credibility. Nobody even mentioned it here before you did.

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This is a loaded question, but I will try to answer it fairly.

If the process is done in good faith and really truly does actually respect community input, then its results can be taken in good faith.

This implies that the community’s statements on the subject ARE taken into account, and CAN affect the final decision.

If you look at all of the situations that we have actually been complaining about, you may notice that the bylaw change is not one of them. Continuing to bring this up suggests that you may be cherry-picking your points a little, though I don’t really see why, since that one isn’t even that advantageous to you.

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Certainly.

It should be kept in mind, though, that in an atmosphere with nontransparent governance and stifling of dissent, it’s a lot harder for people to have confidence in the fairness of such processes. I’m not saying we’re there at this point, but there are some warning signs.

I’ll echo this. I think people who voted for that change made a bad decision, but it was their decision to make. The concerns I have are not about PSF bylaws; they’re primarily about moderation practices on this forum.

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Speaking of which, the NixOS moderation team just resigned en masse:

Their “Steering Committee” tried to restrain them, which is of course not how the team spins it. In their telling of the tale, they’re aggrieved victims.

Right or wrong, suit yourself, but another sign o’ the times regardless. There’s a supremely relevant quote from William Ralph Inge on my blog’s “PSF topics” page.

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An observation: popularity is rarely a good indication of wisdom or morality. In mobs, I’d say there’s strong negative correlation. Which is why I don’t care about popularity. In the end, none of us control outcomes, only what we ourselves do.

But when people feel intimidated, it’s worse. Then “preference falsification” kicks in too: the all-too-human tendency to disguise, or even betray, one’s true beliefs in public statements, to avoid becoming a target.

This does relate to Franz: a number of people pointed out that he had no visible public support whatsoever. Yet 11% of the ballots approved of him, far above the threshold most PR systems set as the minimum to be considered a “serious” candidate (e.g., 3.25% in Israel’s Knesset). Where were those supporters hiding? We’ll never know. They don’t want to become targets too.

And it’s an underlying reason for why, when support for a popular trend fades, it can utterly plummet “seemingly out of nowhere”. Some of the public support was illusory to begin with. If the trend’s leaders’ power to suppress opposition starts to fade, they lose the faux support too.

Then the next trend’s power-abusers take over, and preference falsification boosts their “popularity” too. I miss my sister. Her background was in social psychology, and we spent countless hours discussing the depressing :wink: consequences of human nature.

Hard truths: there is nothing new in human nature, and it’s no more noble now than it was thousands of years ago. There is progress in material prosperity, and knowledge, and slower so in rule-of-law adoption (although that routinely backslides for a while - look at the country most of you live in :wink:). Those are treasures.

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I brought it up as a stark example of a disconnect between one view of “the community” (posts on this forum) and a different view of “the community” (votes cast in the actual election).

And, importantly, the immediate response was to undermine the legitimacy of the election, by characterizing it as a “subset” and thus not truly representative. A subset of what? The controversial change dealt with the rules for a specific type of PSF membership; if the PSF members are not the representative set of voters for deciding that, who could be?

Well, I was reading context clues and subtext. And I’ll remind you that’s almost certainly how you concluded my post was referring to you personally when it didn’t explicitly mention you.

You-can’t-have-that-both-ways-ly yours :wink:

What warning signs?

I see a few people who vociferously disagree with moderation decisions, and I see… not much happening to them? My contention, to be crystal-clear, is that it’s not the case that there’s no avenue for “community input” or whatever. There’s plenty of input on offer, so far as I can tell. And the moderators of this forum clearly read that feedback (and have even acted on it, as noted further up the thread where it was pointed out that although the forum software allows redaction of posts by moderators, they’ve apparently decided, in response to feedback, not to use that capability anymore).

So what people are upset about is not a lack of input, nor even a lack of someone listening to and acting on the input. So far as I can tell, what’s really going on is a vocal handful of users feel their specific input isn’t being given the weight they personally feel it deserves, and that’s something else entirely.

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I concluded no such thing. I replied to what you wrote, that’s all. I didn’t, and don’t, care who you were referring to. I addressed not just my role, but the two most vocal skeptics in that debate. To illustrate what’s obvious to everyone else already: your continuing to use that as an example is counterproductive to you. For whatever reason, you’re clinging to an example that shows the opposite of your claim: one where the very most vocal “losers” yielded to the outcome with no pushback whatsoever. Not a single word.

But suit yourself. Keep pushing it, if you like. I won’t respond to it anymore.

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Well, yes, obviously. I’ve been here for ~15 years, do you think I agree with every decision [1] ever made? Far from it, yet I’m still here (though much less active, but that’s not quite related).

Indeed, the problem isn’t exactly that community members aren’t able to “offer” input. It’s just that input seems to be ignored, even when it’s made in good faith and offers reasonable suggestions.

Definitely. So where is the community process to discuss and decide on moderation rules for this space?

  1. either technical or non-technical ↩︎

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The current conversation feels like I’m trying to defuse a bomb. Which is maybe to be expected given where the thread started, but makes it difficult to engage casually.

(And may bother you or not depending on how you value casual conversation.)

This phrasing suggests that those 11% of voters were reading DPO, or watch/connect with some of the “big Python names” on social media, and were therefore taking in that context. I find it very likely that a lot of the voting members did not know (or care to know) anything beyond the candidates’ statements.

And, to be clear, I don’t think the 89% who did not select him had that further context either.

His statement clearly self branded as a radical, and that has some inherent appeal. But also, as your inspection of the poll results shows, many people voted for 3, 4, or 5 candidates, possibly trying to “maximize the value” of their vote.

Is all of that a problem? Sort of. Being uninformed doesn’t mean you should lose your vote. But uninformed voting is harmful and should be discouraged.[1]

Regarding CoC changes, I see two related things worth following up on.

I hadn’t seen Ofek’s post before, it’s a good idea.

I think he should continue to pursue it if he has the energy, or, if he can’t, we should find someone else willing to push for it. Ideally someone better educated in this space than myself.

It likely has to go via the non public channels, but I’m sure many of us would appreciate “community update” posts on progress (or lack thereof) at a low frequency.

I think this is a significant issue which underlies this and several other contentious discussions on these boards. There is no clearly posted process, AFAIK, by which community members can petition for changes to moderation policy or CoC policy or contents.

The current status quo appears to be

  • you can vote people onto the board
  • you can send people emails

Which is fine as a starting point, but I think having a clear statement of what you should do would help direct these sorts of discussions in better directions.

Also, relatedly, it feels a lot better to be told no than it does to get no reply. Being told “we saw your message, but we didn’t get to it in this quarter’s meeting” is also worlds better than radio silence.

Importantly, most of us have not moderated large spaces before. Or written CoC documents. Or handled HR and firing decisions. Or anything else of the sort. So many of our ideas are likely to be rejected. I think there’s limited appetite to open up a community channel which is likely to mostly attract unhelpful inputs. My hope is that the benefit, in having a clearer outlet for these issues and discussions, is that we can unburden the rest of our conversations and it won’t spill over into other parts of the broader – usually quite fun! – Python discourse.

  1. I consider that a political opinion of mine. Maybe not the most contentious one, but I’d like to acknowledge it as such. ↩︎

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Speaking personally, the experience of the Ideas category suggests to me that such an open community channel would indeed contain a lot of unhelpful input - and if I’m honest, I’m pretty sure anything I might offer would be about as uninformed on moderation/CoC matters as some of the posts on the Ideas category are on the subject of language design. I’d encourage others to do some similar reflection on whether they feel they have enough moderation/CoC enforcement experience to provide positive contributions to a hypothetical open channel for suggestions to the moderation team. Because whatever changes we might want, I assume that burning out the existing mods is not a desirable outcome.

To be 100% clear, because I also feel like joining this conversation is a very high-risk exercise, I’m not suggesting in any way that any participant here (except myself!) is unqualified to have an opinion. Just that people should think about what experience they have when asking for a voice in policy decisions.

It might also be worth considering that the moderators might simply fear an Ideas-style flood of badly thought out ideas. That may well not be what will happen, but IMO it’s an entirely reasonable fear to have.

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That is true, but OTOH, I expect those who are in power and have significant moderation/CoC enforcement experience to document their design decisions if they want community members to understand why they’re doing things the way they’re doing. Dismissive answers ala “if you are not an expert on the topic then you should just shut up” are not likely to be very convincing [1].

(also I don’t know if this space’s moderators actually have previous experience moderating large online communities)

That’s a possibility. But Discourse has tools to limit the firehose (such as throttling individual replies), and I suppose they can be applied proactively if desired.

  1. I know it’s not your stance, but I’ve seen it from other people in the past, notably in CoC-related discussions ↩︎

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Agreed. But we’ve already seen that publishing rationales and explanations can trigger the sort of debate we’re having here - so I can understand there being a certain reluctance to cause yet more of that.

Won’t that simply trigger the same sort of “I’m being oppressed!”[1] reaction that we want to get away from.

It’s a hard problem, and I don’t honestly see a good solution. I’ll go back to lurking at this point, as I don’t think I have anything else useful to contribute.

  1. For clarity, that’s a Monty Python reference, not what people would actually claim. ↩︎

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Not from me at least! Obviously I can’t speak for other people here, but I suppose the kind of people who can’t stand the least amount of moderation, however soft and innocuous, have already left this space. :slight_smile:

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