| 24 Nov 2021 |
 @zimbatm:numtide.com | or should they let the community sort things by themselves, and be pulled in when requested | 11:04:14 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | neither. | 11:04:30 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | with all the grey and nuance in the middle | 11:04:40 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | is the moderation team monitoring behaviour, maintaining list of problematic people, gestapo style :p | 11:05:51 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | 'read everything and enforce their opinion' fails because you essentially end up with a channel only for moderators. 'be pulled in when requested' fails because it only addresses overt conflict, and even then only in part of the cases. the job of a moderator, IMO, should be to address problematic conflict in every sense; both that which is overt, and that which is not (with bigoted comments being a concrete example of the latter) | 11:05:57 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | so it is their job to keep an eye on the community and pick out problematic things, but only in the context of their responsibility to keep the community healthy | 11:06:26 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | that certainly is going to involve some subjective judgment (though that's much less of a problem when you have multiple moderators working together), but that is still very far removed from "enforcing moderator opinions" | 11:07:18 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | as a concrete example, the only cases where I've (very occasionally) banned people in the technical communities I moderate for disagreement on technical opinions, are those cases where someone routinely provided dangerous advice and refused to consider feedback about that. besides that, it is not my job to police technical opinions | 11:09:05 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | * as a concrete example, the only cases where I've (very occasionally) banned people in the technical communities I moderate for disagreement on technical opinions, are those cases where someone routinely provided dangerous advice to newbies and refused to consider feedback about that. besides that, it is not my job to police technical opinions | 11:09:16 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
is the moderation team monitoring behaviour, maintaining list of problematic people, gestapo style :p I don't think "gestapo style" is an appropriate metaphor to invoke here, but yes, most every experienced moderator will maintain a mental list of people to keep an eye on | 11:10:13 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | it makes me think of a rate-limiter, where every infraction bumps the counter | 11:13:39 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | sorry, you're over the rate-limit, 401 Unauthorized | 11:14:15 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it's a bit fuzzier than that, but not too far off from how moderation often works | 11:14:30 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | many "exactly on the boundaries of acceptable behaviour" equal one overt transgression, basically | 11:14:57 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | I knew you were going to say something in those lines :) | 11:15:03 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | * for example, many "exactly on the boundaries of acceptable behaviour" equal one overt transgression, basically | 11:15:15 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | it's a bit the same argument the some cops uses in movies, to justify not following the law. The bad guys are not following the law, and it's just a hindrance to true justice. | 11:17:20 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | * it's a bit the same argument some cops uses in movies, to justify not following the law. The bad guys are not following the law, and it's just a hindrance to true justice. | 11:17:28 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | those are really not comparable for multiple reasons; 1) this is a community, not a nation state (to which fuzzy moderation just can't scale for social reasons), and 2) there is no real accountability to the population in government policing systems, despite what it sometimes says on paper | 11:18:41 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | the problem with fuzzy judgments by cops are not the fuzzy judgments, but the outsized impact that 'getting it wrong' has on society | 11:19:33 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | because of their specific position and circumstances | 11:19:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I have no problem with cops making fuzzy judgments for non-punitive reasons, for example, like trying to decide whether someone needs assistance (in the countries where that actually is a thing, that is...) | 11:20:40 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I don't really want to go too deep into the political weeds here, but basically the entire field of law exists to answer the question of "fuck, subjective judgment doesn't work at this scale. how do we deal with that?" | 11:22:00 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | yeah I didn't mean to open a pandora box. But... I'm pretty sure the cop would use all of your arguments :p | 11:25:54 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | ttyl, lunch time! | 11:26:12 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I think that you'd be surprised :) there are plenty of cops who full well realize their special position in society and how that warrants more care and constraints. unfortunately they tend not to stay cops for very long... | 11:33:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | bon appetit! | 11:34:07 |
 @ryblade:matrix.org | i didn't have time to go over everything that had transpired since i was last here, but one thing in particular stood out to me that i'd like to address. i'm very concerned about the idea of "enforcing cultural norms". this is an international community, which "culture" of the thousands that are represented by our community is going to be selected as the "superior" one? that just seems like an impossible task to pull off without severely offending someone, which is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve, no? | 12:47:25 |
| @ryblade:matrix.org | that's the one bit of language that really worried me from the beginning. based on my age, background, parents and geographic location, tolerating different cultures is the "cultural norm" i was raised on, not picking one out and holding above all others as somehow morally superior. i was taught to consider the circumstances in which others grew up, and how that can mold and shape their own morality, which may look different to my own, but isn't in all cases inferior. for example, lots of cultures haven't gone green. a person with less global knowledge may see them as filthy polluters, whereas a broader understanding of the issue shows that they literally just can't afford things like solar arrays and desalination plants, and neither could we until we lifted ourselves up economically. | 12:52:07 |
| @ryblade:matrix.org | obviously we're not ruling on the issue of carbon footprints among our project, but i picked an example outside the scope of nixos on purpose. | 12:53:35 |
