[bbor]

HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.

This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.

Some random thoughts from the thread:

1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.

2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…

3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…

P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.

[zahlman]

> It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered

Sadly, I don't think it's rare in the FOSS world these days.

> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.

I'd keep an eye out on social media to see what pressure the remaining mods face from those loyal to the resigning ones (including themselves).

> last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle

Everyone quieted down about it, but there was renewed tension in this year's elections thanks in large part to Franz Kiraly's efforts to reform the organization (ref. https://github.com/python-software-federation/psf2025 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103390 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103460 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103760 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103776).

> P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is?

The upset moderators are on the far left (per contemporary American conception of the spectrum). All of this fundamentally goes back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153 , if not further. (Even if I weren't familiar with the story, this would be my prior assumption by now.)

[wizzwizz4]

> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t

One of those is resigning, but for other reasons. I don't know about the last one.

> some arcane art that only experts can truly understand the intricacies of

I mean, it kinda is. It doesn't take long to get up to speed, if you have good teachers (I'd say 3 months), but I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces. (The problem's greater in the space without a culture of teaching the newbies.)

I know nothing about what's actually happening with NixOS, but I can imagine scenarios where the moderation team's in the right, the steering council is in the right, and where neither group is in the right, which would produce the observed evidence.

[bbor]

I edited the part you quoted (sorry! You were quick), but no fundamental disagreement on either point. I’d just say this in response:

1. Yeah it’s confusing, but keep scrolling — the last one is staying. Also the first one said that they’ll try to do mod stuff in their spare time, which tells me they aren’t really resigning

2. Moderation is certainly a skill, no doubt about it — just as policing is IRL. I just find the idea that it’s such an arcane skill that others couldn’t possibly have opinions about it or critically assess instances of it to be… hubristic?

3. Yes, I totally accept that the mod team might be fighting some sort of good fight here that’s separate from the procedural debate (where they’re clearly in the wrong). Still, even if that is the case: they’re not making that point very convincingly, at least for this outsider!

[wizzwizz4]

Funny you should say that about the procedural debate, because I actually have the other opinion about that! The role of a steering committee is to make high-level decisions, and delegate delegate delegate: having direct involvement is a warning sign, and the few instances I've seen of that have gone really badly. (That said, I don't know what it's a warning sign of.)

[zahlman]

> I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces.

Could you elaborate?

[wizzwizz4]

Making Hard Decisions to resolve larger disputes involving multiple people – this is usually a mistake because large disputes are often really hard to understand (so you usually end up picking a side, with that being the wrong side), and they normally fall into one of a handful of archetypes: it's better to analyse them from the archetypal perspective, then take action based on that.

Believing that those who behave in Certain Ways have good intentions. (I've fallen afoul of this, too.) There are certain behaviours that, despite appearing benign or even benevolent (especially when considered together with the actor's explanations), have ime a 100% "actually that was malicious" rate. These are quite sophisticated bad actors, and I'd rather they don't know the tells I've identified, but one of the tells involves the charismatic weaponisation of "cancel culture" by abusers, with part of the tell being to wield "the people's" authority (for some value of "the people") to attempt to modify the composition of a moderation team. (I haven't seen the complete tell in this situation, so there are still benign explanations: this just explains my bias in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403417.)

An impedance mismatch between the behaviour of the new moderator, and the behaviour expected by the community. For example: erring too heavy-handed, or too hands-off; mistaking banter for abuse, or abuse for banter.

Not speaking truth to power. In most BDFL-type collaborative projects, the founder guy turns out to be really ill-suited for the role, in one important respect. (Examples: Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andreas Kling.) In many cases, an intervention can resolve this, and save the organisation for a time (e.g. the 2018 Kernel Maintainer's Summit: https://lwn.net/Articles/769117/); in other cases, the organisation heads down the road to irrelevance (e.g. the FSF). (This is of course not the only kind of situation where you'd want to speak truth to power.)

Speaking truth to power undiplomatically. Power is still power: if you suspect the guy in charge is going to take your intervention badly, raise your concerns to the court jester. If you suspect the guy in charge is a bad actor, tread carefully.

Attempting to use an ethical philosophy not conductive to moderation. These include "let's let everyone do everything not illegal!", "if you have anything good to say about bad people, you're a bad person!", "those who disagree with me are bad actors", "can't we all just get along?", "I want to make sure I'm temp-banning the right person before taking action", "it doesn't matter if I'm temp-banning the right person", "people should follow the rules", "people can ignore the rules if they have a good reason", "we don't need lots of rules", "we should design rules that work for every situation", and "we should rely on moderator judgement".

[squigz]

In your last paragraph, you seem to rule out 2-3 separate approaches to moderation as non-conducive

1) We should have rules

2) We don't need rules

3) We should rely on moderator judgement

How do you think moderation should be approached, if not with rules or moderator judgement?

[wizzwizz4]

I think that question would take a book to answer, and I'm not aware of anyone having written that book yet. (I'm certainly not the right person to write it.) It's not that hard to work this stuff out for yourself, but…

  Trust not your self; but your Defects to know,
  Make use of ev'ry Friend——and ev'ry Foe.
    A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
  There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
  And drinking largely sobers us again.

You can completely destroy a community if you've found some of the fundamental principles, but not those which counterbalance them. (And you don't even need a formal position of power to accomplish this.) It's this partial understanding that I was referring to, in that last paragraph. In the absence of a good book, I don't think a moderator can learn these things without good mentors, a rogues gallery, and many mistakes – but those mistakes can prove fatal without good mentors to fall back on.