| 4 Nov 2021 |
 Emil Karlson | as in not gab | 11:32:08 |
| Emil Karlson | I probably read that more strong interpretation than you | 11:32:36 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I mean, I can think of at least one person in the NixOS community (or well, previously in the NixOS community) who was decidedly peddling fascist ideology and who went off the deep end during the freenode drama | 11:32:46 |
| Emil Karlson | * I probably read that stronger interpretation than you | 11:32:54 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | gab would be very much their speed | 11:33:11 |
 piegames | I've seen people quote a known industry bigot and not back off when pointed out. And probably a lot of other stuff that I'd know if I had the strength to read all messages. | 11:33:26 |
| Emil Karlson | that is anyway one part of the description of the scope of the problem | 11:33:52 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | (I'd rather not name them to prevent this discussion from becoming about a person rather than a broader concern, but I suspect that those who have been around on IRC know what I mean) | 11:33:56 |
| Emil Karlson | how much harm did that person do and how were the current tools insufficient | 11:34:12 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | Emil Karlson: this feels like a very reactive approach to the problem, and I suspect you might be misunderstanding the purpose of RFC98 | 11:34:41 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | the goal of this RFC is not to resolve an acute obvious problem; it's to observe that our community is growing and these kinds of things are beginning to surface, and we need to have the conversation about what we consider acceptable before it escalates | 11:35:16 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | and I can tell you what specifically were the issues that we ran into with said unnamed person on IRC, but that's only ever going to be an illustration of a broader cultural issue | 11:35:52 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | not the full picture of what this RFC is trying to accomplish | 11:36:13 |
| * joepie91 🏳️🌈 is trying to find a way to explain what happened without distracting from the broader problem | 11:37:13 |
| * joepie91 🏳️🌈 * is trying to find a way to explain what happened without distracting from the broader problem, please hold | 11:37:18 |
| piegames | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
(I'd rather not name them to prevent this discussion from becoming about a person rather than a broader concern, but I suspect that those who have been around on IRC know what I mean) I was very probably talking about somebody else, but that illustrates the point: hang around for long enough and you'll see those things come up here and there eventually. | 11:37:22 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | Emil Karlson: okay, so essentially they were doing the Just Asking Questions thing where they were framing things as a 'debate', while making hurtful and/or ignorant and/or bigoted comments in the process, or asking loaded 'questions' that were really just abusive statements masquerading behind a question mark.
this happened repeatedly, and it turned out to be very difficult to call out what they were doing, because the mere framing of it as a 'debate' almost magically excluded their behaviour from scrutiny from the perspective of a number of community members, who pattern-matched it as a "we should keep communicating and keep asking critical questions" argument (which would normally be a good thing), but who failed to recognize a) the bad-faith intentions behind it, and b) the impact that it was having on making the channel uncomfortable for others.
so when calling out their behaviour, instead of the discussion going towards "we should make sure to remain empathic and respectful and inclusive and this is what you can do to make the community a nicer place for others", it veered towards "but I have a right to freedom of speech", which incidentally is precisely what you see happening in the alt-right (including gab) - and more importantly, this pulled along some community members who are less familiar with the dynamics behind bigotry and who took the 'debate' and 'free speech' argument at face value
| 11:43:07 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | this is the major cultural problem in many tech circles, and while it is less present in the NixOS community than many others, it's still very much there: people think too much in terms of 'rational [adversarial] debate' under the belief that it is a technically optimal path to answers, and not enough in terms of the human on the other end whose emotional state is impacted in some way by what others say | 11:44:34 |
| Emil Karlson | but in the reactive viewpoint, was that the typical case of an issue in nixos community? | 11:44:48 |
| Emil Karlson | or more like there is no typical case? | 11:45:11 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | the NixOS community has so far been small enough that not many of these cases have surfaced; I can also certainly say that there are not many people with problematic viewpoints and bad-faith intentions like this, at least not yet... so indeed there isn't much of a 'typical case' simply because the community has been small and cohesive enough so far | 11:45:42 |
| 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 |
