The unelected mods who resigned were refusing accountability being enforced by the elected steering committee, which tells you what you need to know about how the mods ran things.
It kind of doesn't tell us what we need (or want) to know. Or at least, its not clear to me what conclusion is right from that.
On its face, none of these players have accountability. With enough noise individuals could be pressured out from either group. And if either group makes wrong choices, the penalty is just removal.
It's messy; I don't see any obvious answers or conclusions.
I'm a NixOS committer. I avoid Discourse and Matrix and thus avoid almost all drama.
My impression is that:
* NixOS had light governance for many years, which used to be enough, but wasn't enough to adress disagreements as of around 2022.
* A moderation team partially filled that governance gap, but it was seen to be politically motivated, and is now being held accountable by an elected body (the steering committee).
* This shift in power has resulted in tensions.
* NixOS users skew a little idiosyncratic in general. I'd hazard a guess this coincides with wanting full control of their machines, and being willing to upend the status quo to do so.
I'm hopeful that as more governance is rooted in the elected body, we'll have less tension over time.
I'm thankful for all contributors who make NixOS for what it is today.
By “political bickering”, do you mean debates over organizational direction/technical flame wars, debates over political philosophy/ideology, or something else?
Same here! I don’t have a problem with people having different opinions than mine, but when they start banning core contributors for that, it’s just a matter of time before ship goes down. I kind of hoped I was wrong and after all this time the dust settled - not because I was going to use it again, but because the project is a very cool idea.
3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.
Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
> [the SC response] is a good summary of the entire situation
It's unfathomable to me that they're even considering this:
> Are you asking for an elected body to be accountable to an unelected people. I don’t think this is entirely impossible, but it at least needs more thought put into it, and before taking any sort of bureaucratic approach, we should consider changing the governance culture, which is entirely within an SC’s power.
The fact that the moderators would resign and in the same breath call upon people they consider adversaries to resign as well, speaks to their character. As does the vague "Measures are in place to ensure essential capabilities are maintained." wording. This is blatantly a power grab by people who clearly already held far too much power.
> I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best.... Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
If the resigned members stay gone and get exactly nothing out of their appeals, I could maybe agree. It's fundamentally unhealthy to have moderation done by a self-appointing, ideologically filtering clique that's demonstrably at odds with a large portion of the community as well as their elected steering committee.
I've had NixOS on a list to give it a shot one day when I wanna tinker on a weekend project, it's been on that list for quite some time now and just haven't had time for it. I hear good things about the project when I ask other devs, but all I read these days about Nix is about infighting, politics, global bans, governance wrongdoings, and drama.
From the outside, this concerns me for the longevity of the project. I'm sure if it makes it through it could be better for it; but it is concerning and makes me push it further down the list to try.
I worry though as politics and the way the org is run can impact the end user; maybe not today, but in a year. That's my concern with these style projects, there seems to be no real leader. Say what you will about Linus Torvalds, and there's a lot to be said, he really does care about the quality of the project.
Usually when popular projects have this much turmoil there a fork.
Centos stream
Node to deno
Etc etc
Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay. And boom. There’s peace again.
Imagine Bazite's mascot made a distro, well that distro would be NixOS's fork and it's called Lix (https://lix.systems/). When they kicked Eelco Dolstra out of his project (NixOS) Lix became redundant so they stayed in NixOS. Also google is your friend.
You are not allowed to have a moderate opinion on gender representation in tech, and you are not allowed to have photos of steak on your NixOS discussion forum profile:
> Srid states his opinion on the gender survey question under a topic titled “Nix Community Survey 2023 Results”. This response, a week later (see next point below), gets moved to a separate thread and gets unlisted (meaning, nobody can reach it without a direct link) by a moderator.
The problem is that communities want to have (or at least tolerate having) these demographic surveys in the first place. The easiest way to avoid identity politics drama is to avoid identity politics, and the easiest way to avoid identity politics is to minimize and discourage mention of identity. pg was right (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html).
Open source is for everyone. The OSI is abundantly clear about this. For any given project this means everyone in principle; there is no obligation to check whether you have collected all the identity Pokemon. If your group is small this is impossible and if it is large then it is either inevitable or a failure is not your fault (and trying to force the issue is in fact the discriminatory thing). Besides which, the identity Pokedex doesn't exist in the first place. Why even invite the argument about the categories that need to be considered?
You don't draw a circle by adding more sides. You draw it by using a damn compass.
i mean, this is a set of opinions and positions that are far beyond anything that could be called "moderate opinion[s] on gender representation" and are pretty uncontroversially terrible, particularly in the context of any non-homogeneous community of people
if you post something like this to the public internet and stand behind it, then man i'm not sure what you expect, you're self-identifying as an asshole, and it can't be surprising when you're banned from places as a consequence
edit: good lord, i clicked around a bit more on that website, dude is obviously a psychopath, and i feel duped even responding to this kind of nonsense
Could you state, for the record, your understanding of what "opinions and positions" are concretely expressed there, and your estimate of what proportion of the general population you'd expect to agree with them? I'm having a hard time understanding what you find objectionable there, aside perhaps from the fact that a political ideology is being criticized in arguably disparaging terms.
> The first step to resist or undo Woke Invasion in your organization (or your psyche) is to thoroughly understand its creed Critical Race Theory, so as to uncover the fact that generally speaking woke disciples care less about the problems in the world than assuaging their self-centered ideological feelings. 1 The next step, obviously, is then to effectuate an elimination of the wannabe woke invaders from your organization by instituting a culture based on common sense values stripped of identity politics.
this wildly pejorative definition of the central concept at play in the discussion, probably, is a good start to what i find objectionable, yeah?
or maybe the author's own definition of "wokeism"
> Wokeism is a secular religion that originated in the United States of America, based on the pseudoscienfic field Critical Race Theory. It presumably took roots around 2016 (see Woke Invasion) and has been withering away since around 2024. Bigoted ideologies like neoracism fall under wokeism.
which is about on the same level as vaccines cause autism
i'm sure there are lots of people who think otherwise and maybe you're one of them but frankly there is nothing useful to be gained by arguing the merits of this kind of stupidity
> which is about on the same level as vaccines cause autism... but frankly there is nothing useful to be gained by arguing the merits of this kind of stupidity
I prefer to follow the HN guidelines and not use language like that, but the feeling is mutual. Regardless, I'll try:
Certainly srid's rhetoric there would not be appropriate in the HN comment section (and you can see a clear difference in style between that rhetoric and srid's actual HN comments). But it frankly comes across that you primarily object to the fact that someone else doesn't like your politics and seeks to prevent such politics from taking root in more places.
And srid very clearly refers to documented and evidenced phenomena: many academics are quite open about their use of CRT, and there are clear connections between that theory and observable real-world policy (in particular, policies that attempt to effectively implement racial quotas while pretending they are not racial quotas), and abundant critiques of the pseudoscience involved. What is here called "neoracism" (not a term I've heard anywhere else) seems to simply mean racism that targets white people (and sometimes Asians; and where this happens, pointing out Asian victims often seems required in order to get anyone to care). This demonstrably exists (the people claiming it not to exist will commonly engage in it, and commonly seek to redefine terms to excuse themselves), is obviously bigoted (on basic principles of morality that children understand), and has clear real-world impact (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...).
Your shallow dismissal of all of this, aside from not being how we do things here, is ignorant of the available evidence. Taking the so-called "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" efforts at face value is a mistake. We are talking here about people who believe that racism is inherent to being white (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22all+white+people+are+racist%22), and invent terms like "whiteness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory) in order to perpetuate harmful stereotypes (leading to additional concepts like "white fragility", "white defensiveness", "white degeneracy", "white space" etc.). It is pseudoscientific because many of those terms are aimed at not only dismissing criticism without addressing it, but holding up the act of criticism itself as evidence.
The moderation log both explains it very well, and not at all, depending on perspective. When you follow the Discourse and other community forums for a while, you notice that moderation is unevenly applied. Some get permanent bans, other bans counted in hours, if at all. When you are familiar with the names in the moderation log, and the lack of consistency in ruling, you see a very clear moderation bias.
Funny you should mention that. Meanwhile over in the Ruby camp, where they've been trying to gather signatures to run DHH out on a rail (pun intended), someone submitted a PR to replace the entire "open letter" with that document. (It was of course promptly rejected as a troll, which it was, but I was still amused.)
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
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".
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.
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!
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.)
Re: political left/right, you’re stereotyping blithely in a way that doesn’t make sense on its own terms[1] that is disquieting to read, frankly. Been here 16 years and it’s the most oddly rabid political volley I’ve seen in a bit. I hope we have a strong firewall for this sort of thing.
[1] is the SC The Left because they are bureaucratic know-nothings? Is the mod The Left because they’re a big ol’ baby in public? Is the SC The Right because their politician's are seizing levers they don’t know how to control? Is the mod the right because they’re insisting they know better than anyone and aren’t subject to rules?
> I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc
Ofc? You just brought it up! You’d love to litigate it.
> quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there,
Make whom?
> the Python debacle.
Which? :P
> Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
Onlookers.
If so what?
What is sad about not knowing someone’s politics in a forum debacle?
…I guess I’d just respond by saying that you should reacquaint yourself with the definitions of left vs right. It has nothing to do with what you mentioned.
I ask because the python debacle was indeed political — it was rooted in debates about DEI, what constitutes discriminatory speech, and other related issues.
No, I was not cheekily hoping to start a fight about politics.
Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as does my spellchecker. I don’t know what you hope to gain from nitpicking someone’s typos, but I encourage you to answer that question to yourself. Dare I say “nothing”?
I'm really curious: can you share these definitions of left and right?
> Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as does my spellchecker. I don’t know what you hope to gain from nitpicking someone’s typos, but I encourage you to answer that question to yourself. Dare I say “nothing”?
Geez, didn't know it hurt that much :) I'm 37 and still discover words I mis-spell and am grateful when people correct me. I get the need for us all to have a safe space but I didn't know the left went this far...
Pretty funny that you accuse me of being overly political, but then say I'm a far left snowflake for returning a bit of snark. I think I'll have to bow out of this exchange, sorry!
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.
Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
The Nixpkgs repo is a Git repository. I forked the repository and I merge in updates using the normal git workflow. I've tried flakes and stuff, but none of them are as convenient as directly modifying files.
I see it as a reduction in overhead in many ways. Right now moderation doesn’t fall under the elected structure that runs the rest of the project. Bringing it in line with everything else ought to result in less drama.
Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.
> What does it accomplish?
As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.
Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".
For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.
It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.
All large organisations have huge amounts of "useless" overhead. When this overhead is removed, you no longer have a large organisation. Sometimes, having a large organisation is worth the overhead: organisations quietly solve a great deal of issues. But, since they do this quietly, it can be hard to tell which issues they solve; and they loudly create a lot of issues, too. This means it can be hard to tell when they are or aren't worth it, and when organisational reform would actually be expected to improve things.
Why is around 50% of the news I read about NixOS about political infighting?
For no other community this is the case. The technology appears interesting, but from the outside it definitely looks like a continuously collapsing project.
################## MODERATION TEAM REMAINS IN PLACE - NOTHING HAS CHANGED ##################
If you review the post and refresh it frequently, you will observe the censorship in action.
Some instances of censorship are quite extreme. They censor individuals for even the mildest comments. I saw one person get flagged for linking to Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis and requesting more scientific discussion. The TLDR was something like "More of THIS" were "THIS" was a hyperlink to Dolstra's PHD thesis that sparked NixOS. I wanted to reply, stepped away for a meal, and by the time I returned, the comment had been censored.
NixOS isn't a technical project anymore. It's just Dolstra's stole life's work being kept in life support. I don't care which side of the political spectrum you are... this should anger you. They stole this man's life's work through distasteful political shenanigans.
It's like removing Linus from Linux (unsuccessful removal attempts), Stallman from FOSS (unsuccessful removal attempts), and Eelco Dolstra from NixOS (removed).
I don't care for these people thoughts or beliefs, I see them for what they are, thought leaders. People that ACTUALLY move us (humanity) FORWARD. They should stay in place leading their respective movements for as long as possible or until they break the LAW. Not some "constitution of NixOS" or "bylaws of NixOS", the actual LAW of their respective jurisdiction.
In my experience watching their mods over the years, they seem to have a big problem with other people having opinions they disagree with.
I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
And they're moderators, so, what they say is already "the law" (at least in their eyes) anyways... don't need a code of conduct to tell people the mods have the final say regardless.
> I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
I don't think the term "false flag" works that way, but it 110% is exactly that.
Consider how they frame the proposal to add other mods:
> intially phrased as a suggestion, with a stated goal of adding “diversity of opinion” and “tension” to the moderation team
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
> despite this suggestion being immediately rejected as destructive and misguided by the moderation team
Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
This is what you get when you have an unelected body that appoints its own successors and give it the power to enforce "conduct".
... Incidentally, this also perfectly describes the Python Software Foundation's "work groups" for their Code of Conduct (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter) and for "diversity and inclusion" (https://wiki.python.org/psf/DiversityandInclusionWG). (Actually, it seems like most of the work groups work this way.) I'm also amused at how both of these charters refer to "Folks" rather than, say "People". Seems to me like a clear signal of the intended culture, frankly.
> For reference, to my knowledge these words are pretty much interchangeable with "folks" being less formal I guess.
"folks" is indeed less formal, but there are other words in this category, such as "guys". The preference for "folks" is common among people who hold that "guys" is inherently sexist, and thus eventually becomes a signal of a particular perception of what kinds of sexism exist in the world and how sexism works. There are also those who believe that certain uses of "people" have become in some way or another problematic
In print contexts, some even further use this to signal especial interest in issues related to trans rights, by spelling it "folx". That requires the additional explanation that the "x" comes from analogy with other neologisms such as "latinx" that are intended not only to affirm gender neutrality but a non-binary view of gender. Because the reader is expected to recognize this, it functions as a sort of shibboleth.
As little as ten years ago, "folks" might have been judged as quaint or outdated language, used primarily by older people (https://hinative.com/questions/51383). It was largely repurposed for this social justice signaling.
Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
> Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
This is uh... well, seems a bit of a stretch to me. Not once in all my years saying "ya'll" have I ever even remotely put it in this framing, nor have I ever heard of anything like this.
It's like the ok emoji being an "alt right hidden signal" all over again.
Came across a so-far hopefully untainted, different memetic phrase yesterday: "millenial grey".
The girl in her video [0] successfully identified that it is largely rooted in a 2023 media campaign. She then proceeded to feature two supposedly "completely average" friends of hers as definitely unbiased anchors, and held a community poll, also supposedly unbiased. Predictably, everyone knew what "millenial grey" was, and quickly agreed it was the worst thing ever.
She even made a fun little browser-based pixel art minigame where people could customize a room with a number of colorful options, and an extra bland rendition of "millenial grey". I especially appreciated the false implication that your choices in dressing up a pixel art room definitely translates to your taste in real-life house décor; just like watching gangbangs on pornhub means you'd be interested in taking part in one, of course.
Considering this was the very first time I've ever heard this phrase uttered, to see it being used as if it was something you learned after saying mum and dad as an infant, it was approximately the most living-in-a-bubble type thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. She somehow managed to socialize so perfectly tuned around this, she had absolutely zero chance of actually recognizing it for what she clocked otherwise immediately: a manufactured outrage over basically nothing.
But then I do also keep my own - so far, rather short - list of political dogwhistles, so maybe I'm just being uncharitable with my parallels.
"English" is a proper noun referring to language or a subset of the UK, while "english" is spin on a ball.
Similarly, "earth" is dirt while the "Earth" is the planet we're on or the "Moon" is the one we see while a "moon" could be any larger celestial satellite. The sloppiness and stylistic choices some people make make writing more confusing than it needs to be; the English language is difficult already without deviations like people who don't use spaces, punctuation, or capitalization customarily.
> Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
My reading of that is they think it's inherently wrong to add people to the mod team because they disagree with their political views. Which seems reasonable to me.
Maybe, but it seems that might have been their deciding factor:
> despite the specific candidate being rejected as unsuitable by the moderation team, and agreement from SC that at least some of the reasons discussed were disqualifying
I don't really have much context and I do not know those people but every time this type of post pop up on HN I read it. It is obvious those people are mentally ill and terminally online.
And it is not even about politics and woke, I do not think there were any political statement here. It is just obvious this again was written by a crazy person.
So some people had a problem with the Nix leadership for years, they made numerous drama and forked the project (as they have the right to).
But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems...
I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
Why do these useless Wrong Think police keep inserting themselves in open source projects? No one wants the drama they bring to their projects. People are just trying to build software... Open source is not a platform for forcing political and social views on people, and not wanting to be a part of that isn't equivalent to opposing it.
If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
I'm sorry, but I don't really buy into these arguments.
If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
Unfortunately, people being people, political and social views will emerge. Also, people being people, any attempt by moderators to check these discussions will result in complaints, by one side or the other, about being silenced over "correct speak". It does not much matter which side of the social or political spectrum a person falls on.
> If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
As far as I can tell, this all ultimately started because a fringe of activists (aligned with this group of moderators, and possibly including them) within the community decided they didn't like the political implications of where the project got its funding.
Are you sure they would focus on technical matters if I did too? In a given community I can stick to technical matters, then on "my blog" I can write about my political positions.
There's one side that doesn't practically care about that, and then there's the other side that would want me not only removed from that community, cancelled, but even physically assaulted because apparently that's ok because I hold the "wrong" views so laws and human rights no longer apply.
Just to be clear: in some drama about one year ago the moderation team considered that people could be banned solely based on their political opinions if those happened to be right-wing / MAGA / anti-wokism.
Then the drama extended because people, even if they weren't right-wing/MAGA/anti-wokism had to agree with the moderators' political opinions.
So when TFA writes this:
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
What they really mean is: "We went so far left our brains left our bodies and we now consider anyone to the right of Stalin to be a nazi".
The organization of the government and its actions touch literally your entire life. From childhood nutrition to your job prospects and life expectancy.
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of.
Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially.
It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0].
But that means all we have is experiences and opinions about those experiences. Mix this with politics just being a group's opinion, and the fact that there's more than two people alive - what you get is that every opinion can be now considered a political opinion, and since all we have is opinions, "everything" is a political opinion, so "everything" is political [1].
I then find this stupid because it hard-misses the point of the colloquial usage of the word. By being overly universal, it functions either as just a useless segmentation, or as a pointless exercise in pedantry, a rhetorical sleight of hand. It also deals in a good amount of mind-reading, where those considering something a political opinion, rather than just a personal opinion, pretty much implicitly accuse the other person of groupthink, which is a really quite cheap accusation to make with no real argumentational benefit.
But maybe this is one of those rare cases where this definition does have its utility. Let's see.
> It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0].
It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.
And in regards to everything being political: Politics certainly informs a lot of stuff in how you perceive the world. But most things aren't political statements, unless you make it so. And I really don't enjoy interacting with people who make any one thing their whole personality, and that includes politics.
> It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.
That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to. In the interpretation I was referencing, objective reality is assumed to exist, but people are bound to at best asymptotically approach understanding it, yet never be able to fully do so. This also does keep the door open for a common ground to be found, so much so that it even covers the possibility of that not yet existing.
I do identify problems with it though as well. For example, the mere idea of lying becomes fairly challenging to represent in this model (though I'd say not impossible). But yeah, this is the framing I identified to necessarily underpin this claim, if I want to give it any fighting chance at all.
> That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to.
Absolutely. I was just giving my own 2 cents. I am not that good at expressing my thoughts. And tbf, not everyone who goes "everything is political" thinks that there is no objective reality and vice versa. So my wording was definitely badly formulated. But I definitely experienced a decent overlap, and find it very hard to engage in a civil way with people who think everything is political + no objective reality existing.
They also don't understand that everyone who disagrees with me is trying to eradicate me and people like me from existence, and is also racist (although we are both white and upper-middle class.) /s
Is that being up in arms about the usage of woks? I always knew it was a fairly controversial piece of kitchen equipment, but this is a concerning development.
Good riddance, and easily enough replaced.
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