| 4 Nov 2021 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | but... that is changing, especially over the past year, as NixOS is rapidly gaining adoption and airtime in tech circles | 11:45:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | so my concern, personally, isn't "the NixOS community is full of nazis" (metaphorical or otherwise), but rather that "the NixOS community does not have the shared culture and tools necessary to deal with it when we do get a bunch of nazis" | 11:46:35 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | (of course this isn't limited to fascists, it also applies to more interpersonal abusive behaviour, but this is just to use less words :p) | 11:47:04 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | so I do not believe that we currently have a lot of problematic people, just that we should be prepared for when we do | 11:47:28 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | because any tech community that becomes notable enough will attract them, and they can very rapidly take over if you're not careful | 11:47:48 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I guess that you could see Eternal September as a form of prior art here; while there was definitely a strong factor there of "AOL didn't do their due diligence in not wrecking the community", part of the problem there was also that the community was not prepared to deal with the influx of new people and the resulting cultural conflicts | 11:49:16 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | that's just one fairly well-documented instance, though; this same dynamic has played out many hundreds of times in many hundreds of communities since, that experienced sudden growth | 11:49:53 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | probably thousands, even | 11:50:14 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | does that make sense? :p | 11:52:41 |
 Emil Karlson | thanks for the reply, I don't know eternal september, but in general makes sense | 12:05:14 |
| Emil Karlson | (I can google, if I need it probably) | 12:05:32 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | Emil Karlson: the very short summary of Eternal September is that usenet (ie. newsgroups) used to be pretty tight-knit, small community of technologically-aligned people, kind of like a local bar, with the comparative inaccessibility of the technology serving as a gatekeeping measure; and then AOL decided to offer wide-open usenet access to all(?) of its subscribers and suddenly there was a huge influx of new people who knew nothing about the technology, and more importantly, who knew nothing about the unwritten social rules of the existing community... and so they steamrolled the existing community, pretty much, and the existing community was too small to effectively handle the influx, and the fact that the social norms were implicit rather than explicit caused a lot of arguments to break out because nobody had a clear reference | 12:08:08 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | ryblade: GallantChef: I've just finally gotten around to reading the backlog. a couple of observations:
- you continuously complain about authoritarians. yet the whole explicit purpose of RFC98 being structured how it is, is to establish a non-authoritarian structure for maintaining community health. where, exactly, are you seeing 'authoritarianism' anywhere in here?
- your earlier seemingly completely unprompted "are we even allowed to say that anymore?!" and "damn SJWs"-style rants and ridiculing of inclusivity were wholly inappropriate and frankly surreal to witness - considering there wasn't even anyone else interacting with you - and I would have banned you for it had you tried this in a community I moderate. these sorts of rants serve no purpose other than to sow division and adopt a victim role just because you are expected to be empathic and actually consider the impact of your words on others. this sort of aggressive behaviour has zero place in this community as far as I'm concerned, either in the discussion of RFC98 here or anywhere else.
- in the discussion of the Rust CoC, you complained that it was too specific in the groups and such that it named, and instead it should be applied to 'everybody'. yet in the same breath you argue that RFC98 is "too vague and subjective", even though it is phrased vaguely precisely to avoid the problems with defining explicit behaviours and groups that you have already observed. so which is it?
- "the community should be about technology, not anything else" is a non-starter, and frankly a highly privileged position to take. as I had already pointed out yesterday, everything is fundamentally political, and that includes how the technology is built - not just from a "design choices" perspective, but also in who are made to feel welcome in the community that builds it and how their feedback and contributions are treated by others. trying to define behavioural rules in the NixOS community as "tech only" is functionally equivalent to "excluding marginalized groups and designing for dominant social groups" in practice, whether or not you personally recognize that from your position in society.
| 13:08:41 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | (I'm addressing both of you as one, in this case, because you were heavily bouncing off each other in the logs and seem to roughly state the same views and arguments) | 13:11:45 |
 Jonas Chevalier | joepie91 🏳️🌈: you keep making extraordinary claims and making references to abstract looming threats, it's really not helpful to the conversation. Please consider that it's possible to win a conversation rhetorically, and still not generate more shared understanding. | 13:40:44 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I want to learn more about what issues we have today, so if you see anything, please send it my way | 13:44:34 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I really need specific items, in order to understand all the points of views | 13:46:00 |
| Jonas Chevalier | my experience with the nix community in the past has been really positive, I was generally impressed by people's tolerance and understanding for each other's point of views. It's only once we started adding politics that things started being sour.
Now I read that this hasn't been the case for everybody, and that sucks, and I want to better understand these issues. | 13:51:14 |
| Jonas Chevalier | there are existing technical leadership issues which make people bounce, but those are separate from moderation issues, unless you include moderation to resolve technical issues as well | 13:52:42 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I know I'm being naive but I really hope that we can focus more on our shared love of technology and the project instead of our differences | 13:56:22 |
 Jan Tojnar | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
I want to learn more about what issues we have today, so if you see anything, please send it my way the whole point is that we cannot just focus on what we have today, the community is growing and that will inevitably change the culture | 14:00:16 |
| Jan Tojnar | and if we wait until issues achieve critical mass to solve them, the community will already be damaged | 14:01:00 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I don't think anybody in here is arguing against having a moderation team | 14:04:18 |
| Jonas Chevalier | We could actually focus on improving today's moderation, it would be a good step forward | 14:05:36 |
| Jan Tojnar | well, moderable offences are not the only threat to community | 14:05:35 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 |
It's only once we started adding politics that things started being sour.
this is very much false - you are mistaking "I didn't see any obvious issues" for "there are no issues", and "calling out growing problems in the community" as "adding politics"
| 14:06:00 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it doesn't magically become politics when something gets called out | 14:06:15 |
| Jonas Chevalier | so are there issue, or not | 14:06:30 |
| Jonas Chevalier | * so are there issues, or not | 14:06:34 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I keep seeing this flip-flop | 14:06:42 |
