Hey @optimism,

moderation starting to get used for political purposes sounds like a fair concern to me, although I don’t think that people excellence and product excellence are necessarily at odds. We have had a few contributor problems in the past years, one of which just got too hard to ignore recently, most others eventually normalizing.

We also have had a few topics over which the repository had been brigaded, especially in the vicinity of ordinals, inscriptions, and null data outputs. The repository is our workplace. When people brigade the repository, it adds a lot of noise and distraction to our workday. I’m happy that we have moderators this time around.

As you know, we work in public with all of our code contributions, reviews, and most of our conversations being publicly visible. I think we have overall remained open to constructive disagreement and engage with opinion-based discussions in other venues like the mailing list, delving, and social media, but I will admit that we have become less tolerant to nonconstructive and unwanted contributions in our repository. If you see a concrete case of moderation being used to squash minority opinions (rather than just make less visible noisy comments that don’t add new information), please feel free to reach out to share your concern.