Oh this is interesting to me, in particular in light of the critical exchange that I helped spark regarding the newly adopted Code of Conduct.

I am not really sure how I feel about this one though. I kinda can see both sides here.

Yet, what I find more important than individual accountability is whether there exists an effective (!!!) mechanism to get rid of the moderation team and exchange it with new people if need arises.

Mitigation of abuse of authority by a collective body doesn’t necessarily require pinning it down to individual actors I believe. You might just exchange the whole team if necessary.

But I’d love to hear more perspectives on this.

I’m happy with the process as it is currently.

This mechanism exists. The Moderation team was created via the RFC process and is subordinate to it. If an RFC is accepted that changes the membership of the moderation team, the membership will be changed.

Ryan

I’m proud of this team, happy it exists, and I think it is doing a good job. The introduction of effective moderation always has detractors, which is fine and good. However, effective moderation is a necessary part of an effective community. I trust the moderation team to do a good job, and ultimately the NixOS Foundation to step in if it ultimately needs to, which I’m sure it won’t.

Overall, I’ve heard extremely positive feedback about the moderation team, and I can imagine folks who have skirted the edge on being a positive contributor to the ecosystem may feel threatened by it. That is normal, too. If parts of the community are unhappy with moderation or other processes / outcomes of the project, it is always possible to exercise the four freedoms of open source and create the project and community they want.

I also want to join Graham on this wholeheartedly.

Moderation team is doing a difficult job while doing also their own job (contributors, work, etc.) and I am deeply respectful of the work they are doing.

Not everything is perfect and things can be frustrated, but, I believe this team is a team with whom you can discuss, talk over things, disagree on things and that is a very important property, therefore, I can totally imagine what kind of stories, situations, can lead moderation team to do difficult decisions and I support them.

Thank you again to the moderation team for doing all of this work, it’s extremely hard to convey the importance of this work w.r.t. to its visibility.

So if I get this correctly then your point is that “hurdles to effective accountability are high”. Now the question is of course: How would a more effective accountability look like for you?

Because, if I understand correctly here, too, the counterargument is that too low a standard for accountability is prone to abuse and exposes people to personal risk. And moderation does require a certain protection, first to find people to do it, and second to be effective.

And we cannot deny that there is at least a process in place.

Point 1 is already effectively implemented through https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/blob/23620893fec32b3e87c84c01353fecde0314f6f2/community/teams/moderation.tt 26

I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by repeatedly asserting that there are no checks and balances. The team has been very clear about this: they are subordinate to the RFC process. The community can use RFCs to hold them accountable and impose any checks and balances the community can get through the RFC process. If you have a specific proposal, make an RFC for it.

If you do make such an RFC, and if it is accepted, and the mod team for some reason refuses to abide by it, then it’s time to say oh no, there is no accountability. But the rules of the game seem pretty clear to me right now, with no evidence that they won’t be followed.

Thinking that creation of the moderation team has changed the processes or the style of moderation is mistaken. The RFC, when compared to reality before it, effectively said that the people doing the moderation are given specific places for announcing team changes and bans, and otherwise continue whatever they were doing before.

I do agree that even the briefest summary of what moderators found the key unacceptable component of world-visible behaviour — have we ever had a ban purely for unacceptable PMs? — would be a useful addition to posting a general summary of moderation principles (call it CoC ot whatever), maybe even a more useful thing than CoC on its own (although it is useful to say that moderators agree that the general policy of enforcement aligns with some text).

Then Moderation Team: please provide the secret reason for the ban.

The Moderation Team can ban anyone without publishing who did the decision and why but anyone oppugn them has to open an RFC?

And now, in this thread, The Moderation Team just hidden all posts they don’t like without a reason?

My account here is not linked to any personal account because I don’t want to be a target of GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP but it seems this can also save me from the NixOS Moderation Team.

I understand I should assume good faith. But trusts is hard to establish. If a controversial is made and then clarified later, then I can trust the team. How can I trust someone who keep banning people in black box?

It’s not a secret: Update moderation-log.md · NixOS/moderation@e9d67b7 · GitHub 54

Quoting myself here from elsewhere: “Posts that get flagged by Discourse community members with a sufficient trust level get automatically hidden at first, although the moderators eventually have the final say (there is a review queue). Please don’t make any bad faith assumptions.”

We are currently hiding all posts that are off-topic or inflammatory.

Yes, I actually have to agree that my last post was somewhat off-topic.

Glad to know that the reason is not a secret. It’s a big step toward a more transparent administration and the Moderation Team gets more trust from me. Unfortunately the reason is published late and only by a team member in a reply. This can’t dispel all misgivings though so I still hope to see more details.

The reason is not published by default because it’s a public log and people that got banned might get into trouble in their personal life/carrier i.e. if they maybe in a few years later they try to apply for a job. We always tell the person in question in private why they got banned. In this case we made an exception because the person explicitly allowed this.

Someone pointed out that the recently adopted CoC FAQ states:

Contributor Covenant only applies in project spaces and when an individual is representing a project. Your conduct outside of these situations is not governed by the code of conduct.

Revisiting srid. Knowing now that he was misguided in posting a public poll about the state of his moderation, what do you think was the catalyst that lead him to that misguided action?

[I deleted my own reply by accident! Re-typing …]

This is important IMO. We can’t (and I’m glad we don’t) have a rule that the reasons for a moderation decision have to be made public. They might be confidential, not only because of embarrassment to an individual (although I guess that’s the most likely reason) but also for all sorts of other moral reasons and also legal reasons.

Or maybe logical consistency is just more important to some folks than others. Also curious why this post hasn’t been blocked like all the other supposedly “imflammatory” posts in this thread. This seems a bit more deliberate than some of those

To address your obviously sarcastic point, so if someone feels hurt or threatened by something of the correct persuasion, it is encumbant on the community to protect them, but if they are of the undesirable persuasion then it’s cool to ridicule them and imply they have mental health issues?

Perhaps if you had been more willing to presume goodwill from your interlocutor, you would have seen that

was a response to

i.e., the (sarcastic, yes) suggestion was to employ a psychologist to analyze Srid’s motivations, not to fix some implied mental health issue of tgunnoe’s.

This exchange does indeed illustrate a general problem, but perhaps not the problem you were intending to highlight.

agree to disagree, that’s not how it reads at all

Instead of dunking, why not actually elaborate your point, if you have one?

No dunk was intended. My point is what I opened the post with: presuming lack of goodwill leads to perceiving lack of goodwill, in a vicious cycle. This is a sensitive topic, passions are flaring, and it’s fine for people to express themselves passionately (if respectfully). But in order for that to work, we need to acknowledge each other’s value and not be looking around every corner for someone trying to persecute you for wrongthink—because if you presume it, you will find all the evidence you need to convince yourself, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

These various moderation-related threads have had a lot of that, it seems to me, and not enough pausing to consider the best ways something might be interpreted. If the question is ‘why isn’t this post flagged?’ for example, is your first impulse to find the evil thing in the community that permits this post while rejecting others? Or could it be to find the good (or at least neutral) thing that this post does but is absent in others? Do you presume persecution and unfairness, or do you presume that someone else has a different perspective and try to understand it? Same question, different attitudes, different outcomes for likelihood of reconciliation of the community.

All things considered, I genuinely appreciate the thoughful response, please allow me a chance to respond to some of your points to hopefully clarify my position…

Agreed, however I also believe in honesty in difficult conversations, and after years of seeing the same general trend with no real solution, my good faith has honestly been totally exhausted. I would be lying if I said otherwise.

Again agreed, and I really don’t intend to persecute anyone. It’s not my bag, personally. I am and have always been interested in this community for technical reasons, and I find the political aspects draining and unrewarding personally. It isn’t my intention to see anyone banned or punished.

However, from my own point of view, it does seem there are some very real biases that exist that are not being properly addressed and indeed are being systematically dismissed any and every time a member of the community attempts to address them. Further, these issues, at least the ones I have had exposure too, only seem to bias in one direction, which is the root of my concern.

It is my belief that good leaders are rare, and I am more than willing to extend copious amounts of grace to those who attempt to step up. What I am not willing to support, however, is an attitude which boils down to, “I’m right, and if you disagree I will simply ban you.”

In my view, It’s more or less fine to have that attitude as a regular community member; it is your perogative, but for a leadership position I find it inappropriate. Further, I feel it is a mark of bad leadership when someone is unwilling to at least consider their own biases, especially when being critical of others.

Also agree. I would simply say that, from my perspective at least, part of the problem is that I have tried to do just that, and each and every time I’ve been met with a wall of utter resistence that seems unwilling to advance beyond their own narrow worldview. Indeed, the impression I have gotten several times is that any opposition should just be exhausted until they literally just give up.

This may create an illusion of consensus or closure, but in reality it sometimes seems almost intentional. Human beings have limitations, and it is far easier to fluster your opponent into an ineffective angry rant and proceed to character assasinate them than it is to understand them. We’d be lying if we pretend this isn’t a factor.

Unequivocally no. I do not presume to know anything about the intentions of others. All I can speak to are the general trends that I myself, and others have pointed out. I am very interested in alleviating my ignorance, in as far as that is possible, and I make real effort to attempt to understand the viewpoints of others. That said, I do not believe all viewpoints are equal or valid, and part of my issue here is that I simply cannot understand the rationale behind a lot of these decisions, and any time I inquire, it seems the response is more or less, “that’s the way it is, deal with it.” Although never that bluntly, thankfully.

This is a programming community after all, I would presume that we are generally more interested in logically sound ideas than the general public would be. However, I am failing to find a logically consistent thread here at all. Again, as I have said, I am more than willing to extend grace, and I realize that mistakes and oversights are commonplace. I am also freely willing to admit the possibility that it is me who is mistaken. I’m not upset if things don’t go my way, and it really doesn’t bother me personally.

I really feel more compelled to speak on behalf of other members of the community, who I know have hit the same wall I have, and yet seem reluctant to speak up, giving an illusion of consensus where one does not exist. If I can, I’d like to express the shared frustration in a way that is hopefully productive, but also, as I said in the beginning, my patience has been spread fairly thin at this point. And if things continue in this way, the most likely response is that I will simply resign once again.

But this is all meta, it seems we can never really get into the meat of the issue without somebody getting blocked or silenced, which I guess is the best way I can concisely express the issue. I’m more than willing to consider the possibility that perhaps in my current position, I am simply not equiped to express the problem in a productive manner, but for the sake of the community at large and those I feel are not recieving a fair voice, I’ll venture to try.

I feel this topic is slowly going in circles. All I’m picking up are vague feelings of persecution by people who seem to feel personally attacked by moderating decisions that don’t concern themselves.

I’ve personally been happy with the moderation, though I’ve also been more of a lurker. Good moderation is hard. I thank the people doing this job, not just juggling a lot of difficult communication but constantly having to defend what they do. I get notified for everything in the moderation github repo and its always the same people concern trolling the decisions made.

If you really think you have found some better way to do moderation write it down in an RFC. Saying they should reform from “within” feels like a lazy way to get the responsibility of coming up with the better solution out of your own hands; you can keep vaguely gesturing at “accountability” undermining the moderation in the process without having to do the hard work of figuring out how better moderation would work in practice.

I defer to @expipiplus1 excellent post earlier in this thread that was unfortunately hidden that links some really good articles around moderation and community safety.

Yes I personally am grateful you posted that @blaggacao . I am still deliberating with myself how to proceed in all of this. There seems to be some bad karma here when it comes to these issues: Code of Conduct, moderation team, political attitudes. Maybe not surprising with politics involved, but still…

I read the little bit of stuff that I could get from Srid thanks to your post.

I intellectually fail to grasp what exactly he was suspended for. Was it a picture of a steak he cooked due to his diet? Or a link to a bit of political content outside this forum? Or was it sharing controversial viewpoints on debates brought up by others (!!!) on this platform? I don’t really get it …

Yet after saying this, and having engaged in these controversial issues myself for a short time on this forum, I can also see why so many people appear to be in love with Codes of Conduct and proactive moderation. All these debates tear people down on an emotional level (including me sometimes btw), they take up a lot of energy that could otherwise be spend on making things (much more gratifying I think), and they have a tendency of leaving all sides frustrated.

I am a bit at a loss on what to make of all of this to be honest.

He was suspended for not doing what mods asked him to do.

They asked him to change behavior around all those things you mention, but based on his account and the mods’ account it seems they agree that the suspension happened after Srid said that he’d only obey the mods if they did something he wanted (i.e., turn the things he was being asked to do into universal rules that they would prosecute against everyone equally).

The moderator team has authority. If authorities only asked you to do things that you were willing to do out of your own desire, there would be no need for them. It follows that under some circumstances an authority can be expected to ask people to do things that they don’t agree with. If people treat such requests as optional, or the opening to some sort of negotiation, again the moderators are not really doing anything special—any one of us can make a not-backed-by-power appeal to someone else in the community.

If you agree that moderators should exist and do something that makes them different from other members of a community, it therefore follows that you should expect those moderators to occasionally ask people to do things that those people don’t agree with, and that those people should comply or face the consequences.

If that sounds horribly authoritarian to you—it is authoritarian! Authority is the governance model we have. Want to start a constitutional democracy with separation of powers and legislation and judicial review and all that good stuff? Write the constitution and get the community to agree to it, or start your own community with that as a founding document and see who joins you. That’s massively difficult work, but it’s something you could do.

If you think you are willing to put up with authoritarian governance but think that the authorities made the wrong call in suspending Srid after he failed to comply with their requests, I say you don’t understand authoritarian governance.

And if you think that the authorities should not have asked Srid what they did, at last there is a concrete topic of conversation that I think might be productive. It’s not about what he was suspended for. It’s not about oversight, transparency, or accountability. And it’s definitely not about ‘keeping politics out of tech’ or any such nonsense. It’s about your politics not agreeing with the mods’ politics on this specific issue, and whether you can convince other humans to change their politics to align more closely with yours (or, perhaps, be open to being convinced to change your politics to align more closely with theirs, if that’s not too rich of a fantasy to entertain).

I’m not talking about what ought to be. I’m simply describing what is. Feel free to correct any specific factual claim you think I got wrong. (I have no idea what ‘People don’t “sign up for”, people “participate”’ is meant to refer to.)

For the record, this is the sort of attitude I warned about years ago. The ones so eager to rule are rarely the most fit to.

But I don’t share your enthusiasm for authoritarianism, so I’ll just reiterate what I said back then and leave it be. If that’s the direction the community wants to go, so be it. But is it though? Was this ever for or about the Nix community?

Even at the time the intial conversation was happening we were only ever talking about protecting a small contigent within the community that, I must assume by their silo-building actions, believes that their socio-political outlook is the only acceptable one.

That’s how I define radicalism, personally, but to each his own.

A misunderstanding. I have no enthusiasm for authoritarianism. What I have is an allergy to people criticizing authoritarianism without offering an alternative other than authoritarianism run by people who agree more with them.

I also, admittedly, don’t think that authoritarian online communities are nearly as bad as authoritarian governments in the real world. The vast majority of online fora are governed by authoritarian power structures (i.e., they have moderators and those moderators make and enforce the rules per their own beliefs) and much of the time that is good enough. The worst case scenarios are wildly divergent—in one, abuse of authority can lead to confiscation, imprisonment, death; in the other, abuse of authority is pretty much limited to not having your words published by someone else’s server.

If nobody will propose and succeed at implementing an alternative to authoritarianism, the only thing to do is operate with an understanding of the way authoritarianism works, or decline to participate. That’s not enthusiasm; that’s realism.

That’s a relief.

I actually agree. But what if the authoritarian leadership takes on a radical opinion that willfully excludes productive members of the community? Do we just stand by and watch as they justify everything under the paradox of tolerance? What about the paradox of the oppressed? What the hell is so offensive about steak anyway, cause I’m still not getting it.

It is one thing if there is an authoritarian BDFL who is actually primarily concerned with the health of the community and the project, but what if the leadership puts personal political motivations above the good of the community? We can’t even point it out or dare to disagree without risking a ban? Seems destructive and wasteful to me.

What if the leader of a technical project takes a direction that you don’t agree with?

• Reach out to them about it.
• Try to be civil and reasonable.
• Present your point of view concretely; avoid starting from abstract principles that may mean different things to you and the leader.
• Respect that the leader may not want to discuss the decision.
• Decide for yourself, based on what the leader does, whether the outcome is something you can work with.

It would be nice if the mods would offer some sort of statement to the effect of, ‘Except in cases of extreme provocation, we won’t issue any bans without giving the subject notice and a chance to make things right first.’ That seems consistent with the way they’ve been operating so far. Would that alleviate this concern?

(You probably don’t like it, but if making a commitment like this I think the mods should have an ‘except in cases’ escape clause, not to silence civil dissent but to stop the troll who drops in and starts spraying invective and slurs everywhere—‘we’ll give you a day to edit your posts’ is not really an appropriate response to that guy, nor is playing whack-a-mole with the individual posts as they come in fast and furious.)

Apparently you are pointing it out and aren’t banned yet. Notice anything?

Of course, if one reads it, one should be careful to make sure to separate direct observations from implications and guesses, as the latter are likely to be wrong (intransparency of some things is real), and some are indeed wrong (I don’t think being more specific will convince anyone, and I’d risk divulging information that became clear from private communication).

Yeah, Nixpkgs has been there believed that, the story ended up with some people setting up social pressure to talk the leader into a commitment to either discussing or fully delegating, and then this has been used to push through some changes the leader initially opposed but didn’t want to discuss in detail.

My understanding is that a rules-first approach to moderation was tried via an RFC, agreement couldn’t be reached, so instead we have a moderation team that makes decisions based on their best judgment. As has been stated ad nauseam, if an RFC ever manages to establish rules that the community agrees on, the moderation team agrees to abide by them. Until and unless that happens, it’s completely absurd to say that the mod team can only ask people to do things based on the empty set of rules the community has agreed on.

Have you, or anyone else with this concern about what appears to be, reached out to the mods in any of the channels they have specified for raising concerns 4—as opposed to trying to start a public mud fight—and simply asked why the mods asked Srid to remove his cover image?

Is there any place we could see basis for the “best judgement”, because at least two of the requested items don’t seem to relate to NixOS (so what is “best” about this judgement?). But arguing over off-topic things should, yes, be done elsewhere (wasn’t that complied with?).

(I guess you can tag the moderators again if you are afraid they are not reading this, but I’d assume they are seeing the topic discussed here and elsewhere.)

@rhendric

I think your post needs a little response. Anyone reading this should in advance know that I myself DO NOT agree that your description is accurate though. I think, as far as I am concerned, the moderation team did a reasonably good job so far. And it is a difficult job too. But I think, if intended as a defense of the moderation team in place, you really did the opposite here.

He [meaning Srid] was suspended for not doing what mods asked him to do.

If that were really true, I think the whole team should resign. NixOS is too big to have that kind of arbitrary basis for decision making without any kind of guidelines for what to expect in advance. It creates uncertainty beyond belief. Unless of course NixOS adopts such a model explicitly, like a benevolent dictator governance model. But part of the Code of Conduct movement is to tame the Torvaldses of this world. So it seems a bit of an odd move to make at this point.

But even then, in every case of authority there is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate use of it. Benevolent dictators for life are assumed to be benevolent for a reason. If that distinction isn’t made, nobody needs a Code of Conduct that is supposedly there to clarify the very basis of moderator conduct.

So my point in asking my question obviously was: on which legitimate ground was Srid suspended?

Notice here that in order for authorities to be accountable at all, the debate about what constitutes legitimate grounds for their actions needs to be done by those affected by those actions. Not by the authorities. So once such a debate gets shut down, you kinda know in which world you are living.

So when you ask someone to change behavior from an authoritative position, there still needs to be some reasonable ground for that other than the authoritative position itself. This is the deeper reason for why I said that I intellectually fail to grasp the decision.

the suspension happened after Srid said that he’d only obey the mods if they did something he wanted (i.e., turn the things he was being asked to do into universal rules that they would prosecute against everyone equally).

Taking into account what I just said I would go on like this this: that demand appears to be very reasonable. Any authority that is legitimate can produce an account of the reasons of its decision. Part of this account will be universal rules, part why the particular falls under one of the universal rules. The rules also need to apply equally to all cases, which is obvious from their being universal. In western legal systems it is often required from judges to produce an account of their decision in writing.

And since we are all reasonable people here, and since there is a procedure in place for reasonable people to hold the authorities accountable, asking for the reasons backing up a decision by the authorities is quite reasonable too. Otherwise the procedure would be void. And no accountability could ever be had.

My baseline is this: The giving of reasons cannot be be avoided by the authorities.

I think what Srid was demanding here, according to your own account of the matter, is basically fairness in moderation. No more.

If you think you are willing to put up with authoritarian governance but think that the authorities made the wrong call in suspending Srid after he failed to comply with their requests, I say you don’t understand authoritarian governance.

Well, not if the request was illegitimate. That is my point in a way. And I do understand authoritarian government. My extended point is there is no reason to ever create one if you can avoid it. Or, if you have one, to get rid of it. Unless you are the one calling the shots of course.

And if you think that the authorities should not have asked Srid what they did, at last there is a concrete topic of conversation that I think might be productive. It’s not about what he was suspended for.

You could also say it might be an overreach in the competence granted to them. And in a way Srid himself pointed to this by asking: on the grounds of which rule are you making this request?

The two questions are not independent as you seem to assume. Because if they never had the competence to ask him to do something, then suspending him on the basis of non-compliance with the request is baseless. So the illegitimacy of the request entails logically the illegitimacy of the suspension if the suspension was due to non-compliance and not something else entirely.

I also believe that the reasons for suspension, as for any decision, are always very concrete, even though they include universal rules.

It’s about your politics not agreeing with the mods’ politics on this specific issue

1. First of all that directly contradicts the assumption that “being respectful of differing viewpoints” should be how we guide our conduct thanks to the newly adopted Code of Conduct. That is a fairly obvious point that Srid himself has made on his blog.

2. One of Srid’s quite contentious points on his blog is that “the core team has deliberately instituted a woke echo-chamber”. Are you actually agreeing with this? Because you sound like him a little bit. I personally don’t agree with this btw,. But your description is somewhat striking.

3. I don’t think you make a great case against “‘keeping politics out of tech’ or any such nonsense”. In fact, as I see it, letting general politics enter tech has led to this result. Meaning the suspension of Srid, who is a really technically competent guy, much more so than I am. I don’t think the result is good. Had both sides kept politics out of tech the result would have been better. It would never had created the contentious issue in the first place. And his competence would have been preserved as part of this community.

Because of this, I would call for depoliticization on all sides inside tech communities in order to put technical questions center stage and protect people’s time. That decision is of course a political one with respect to the governance of tech communities. But since you accept the authoritarian implementation of such decisions so nicely, I see no grounds for you to object to it once it is made.

4. It is somewhat strange that when trying to elaborate on your authoritarian model of governance you give the example of a technical team leader. Does the moderation team look like being concerned with technical questions to you? It doesn’t to me. None of the issues in the Code of Conduct concerns how I format my nix code, or how to name a PR on GitHub or any technical issue really. Your example appears to be misleading.

If you agree that moderators should exist and do something that makes them different from other members of a community, it therefore follows that you should expect those moderators to occasionally ask people to do things that those people don’t agree with, and that those people should comply or face the consequences.

Ironically, after all of this disagreement, I totally agree with you here. But this isn’t actually authoritarian at all. It is just authority and equally applies to legitimate and illegitimate use of it. Whether it is legitimate however depends on whether there is an account available to judge the adequacy of the decisions taken, and whether the decision is open for revision if found lacking by a sufficient number of people affected by it.

I expect that if people are asked to do certain things that are not technical questions in which the technical leader can be assumed to have superior technical insight, that there is a reason readily available, from the one doing the asking. This reason explains and limits the competence of authorities asking such things. And otherwise I expect that people are not being asked such things.

On all the lengthy disagreement with you that I voiced here, that is the main point it appears. I expect non-technical authority to not transgress the bounds of intelligible legitimacy.

I’m not talking about what ought to be. I’m simply describing what is.

If that is the case, will you join the revolution if there is going to be one? Because what you are describing is basically an account of illegitimate authority.

Just for the record: I don’t think this description actually matches reality. From all that I have seen the moderation team really has a hard role to fulfill because on some topics the opinions move far apart so someone is going to be dissatisfied either way and you cannot please everyone. And these discussions are actually quite hard and emotionally stressful and all of that.

But it is striking that you come up with this kind of explanation once someones asks what are the reasonable grounds for a certain decision. Remember that people sold the Code of Conduct to me in the other discussion by saying: it makes things explicit, implicit power structures are bad, they only serve those who are already in power etc. etc. … well if your reasoning stands, the explicit power structures might do the same, just on a bigger scale. So they are actually worse.

it’s completely absurd to say that the mod team can only ask people to do things based on the empty set of rules the community has agreed on.

But thanks to the moderation team itself, the set of rules is no longer empty. It is written down in the Code of Conduct. Which, people told me, is an exact or at least close-enough account making explicit what has been implicit practice of moderation so far. So it appears very reasonable indeed to take this document and make it the baseline standard of accountability.

don’t think that authoritarian online communities are nearly as bad as authoritarian governments in the real world.

I have a feeling with the recent politicization of society at large, that has changed a bit. Of course in online communities you can always just leave. But if it gets worse, the abuse of authority can do substantially more damage in online communities than “not having your words published”. The overall culture has deteriorated to such a point that the damage, I feel, is potentially much greater now than it was back in, say, 2015 or so.

What I have is an allergy to people criticizing authoritarianism without offering an alternative

I hope my alternative is clear: Use the general rules readily available now (Code of Conduct) to make sure authorities actually are guided by them and can ground their decision in them. And make sure to put pressure on them when decisions go against the rules or a not readily grounded in them.

The job of the moderators is to ensure a safe community, not to enforce things “related to NixOS specifically”, so I don’t understand where this question comes from.

More broadly: something that seems to be getting lost in the discussion here is that community management is a specialization. It is a skill, and one that is particularly difficult to learn. If you are not an experienced community moderator (and merely “having a mod flag” doesn’t qualify for that), then you are almost certainly going to see moderation decisions that you do not understand, because they are the result of years of expertise and learning about behavioural patterns, something that people don’t typically do outside of community management jobs.

Now of course it’s understandable to want to understand how a certain moderation decision was arrived at, and it’s certainly possible for moderators to make mistakes - they are people and therefore fallible like everyone else. Having an inquiring conversation about moderation rationales is thus reasonable.

However. It is not reasonable to assume by default that if you, personally, do not understand a moderation decision, then it must be wrong unless proven otherwise. You wouldn’t assume a carpenter to be wrong just because you don’t understand their techniques; so why would you do that with a moderator?

And yet, that is what very often happens, and it is what happens here too. People could privately reach out to moderators, and ask them to explain the moderation decision, and that would be fine. But aggressively demanding explanations while implying that it must be an invalid ban because you don’t personally see the reason is something entirely different, and very much out of line.

Part of this expertise of community management also means realizing that a “legalistic approach” to moderation (“it’s only bannable if it’s in the rules”) does not work, for the simple reason that moderation fundamentally involves dealing with bad-faith users at times. That doesn’t mean that all moderation is against bad-faith users, but some of it always will be. And bad-faith users will rule-lawyer, because their goal is to find a way to be an asshole that Technically Complies with the rules, but violates their spirit.

In other words: a moderation team that strictly implements a set of community rules (whether you call them “rules”, “code of conduct”, or anything else) just cannot do their job. This is where the subjective judgment of moderators comes into the picture; their job is to keep the community safe, not to enforce rules. If something is creating an unsafe environment, then it is their job to do something about that, regardless of what the rules say.

Right, but although I have been on Srid’s homepage (link to which was requested to be removed), I don’t remember there being anything forbidden there; but also I don’t remember what actually was there because the content wasn’t of interest to me. I.e can’t people just not read content they are not interested in? And also not go to a profile where they find an image they don’t agree with, etc? (Although I guess for those who are compulsed to read stuff they don’t need are also compulsed to report it to the mods and that’s why this outcome?)

Seems to me that NixOS mods banned Srid due to an unrelated topic to NixOS itself and then abused their power to enforce their opinion. I say this in context that all evidence of the “behavior” Srid should have changed has been removed, the three requests do seem weird though.