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500 sats \ 3 replies \ @Murch 5h \ parent \ on: Mom and Dad are Fighting....Again (Re: Bitcoin Core OP_RETURN Restrictions) bitcoin
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.
Thank you for replying.
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.
Yes. It's kind of cringe when brigading happens. The emojis on comments are cringe too - also in Peter's PR mentioned here - but imagine each emoji being a message: that would be truly obstructive, especially since GitHub's issue comment system is horrible for large discussions. It can always be worse!
However, remember that "we" are working on the software that is considered the leading implementation for a protocol that literally enables the 7th largest asset by marketcap in the world. There will be brigades. There will be fights. There will be drama. Because people can be angry, are seeing threats to the idea they just had, or generally - and this is an observable trend since the global 2020 trauma we've all lived through - do not feel a responsibility to be polite.
The repository is our workplace.
Is it "yours" though? I think this is the crux of the issue and the reason why I refer to this as a people excellence vs product excellence kind of thing.
When discussions were moving away from the mailing list to delving, that was sort of a flag to me but at the same time understandable and acceptable, especially if the mailing list would still be used for detailed proposals after they've been worked out in a more controlled and still public setting. The latter doesn't happen really because most of the time
proposals are presented as a (symbolic?) announcement, but okay, we still have the repository. There will be a chance to reply to things; flag up concerns on a platform that has many eyes.However, the privilege of writing a comment on a pull request seems to be taken away from some people now; to my knowledge this happened twice or thrice this month on higher profile people, including a former maintainer? I don't always (and in a few cases, I absolutely don't, depends on the content) agree with the people that are now silenced, but is this truly the noise that needs to be filtered for the greater good of Bitcoin? Or is this for the greater good of the maintainers? This is my concern.
The reason why I have never contributed to Bitcoin Core code was because back when I was interested (and a decade+ more eager), Gavin was captaining a super tight regime and it was really hard to be heard at all if you weren't part of the in-crowd, or at least that's how I, and some others like me, experienced that. There's plenty of documentation of that sentiment around the web - some people actually became shitcoiners because of the extreme gatekeeping.
However, post "war", it felt as if Bitcoin Core became one of the (if not the) most thoroughly reviewed software in the world. We've seen people rise through the review club to become maintainers. People from outside coming in and doing spectacular work - and often sticking around too.
I'd beg everyone involved to harden their skin in times of controversy, not engage in ad-hominem, but also not fight fire with fire in that regard: silencing people, especially former colleagues that didn't leave but were removed, carries across a bad vibe to the public. Perhaps, in an effort to find a middle ground, the moderation rules can be made much more explicit and reduced in scope?
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Is it "yours" though? I think this is the crux of the issue and the reason why I refer to this as a people excellence vs product excellence kind of thing.
Yes, the repository is, quite literally, our workplace. We encourage other people to also make it their workplace. We are happy for people to follow along or constructively contribute, but people that don’t work there are guests. We expect some minimum decorum from our guests. We handle disagreement well, and disagree among each other often enough, but someone standing in your office repeatedly shouting crackerbarrel talking points at you without making an effort to understand their discussion partners’ view points doesn’t cut it.
However, the privilege of writing a comment on a pull request seems to be taken away from some people now; to my knowledge this happened twice or thrice this month on higher profile people, including a former maintainer?
I’m not sure who you mean when referring to a former maintainer. I’m aware of ariard getting banned recently, and BitcoinMechanic being banned for a day to cool off. I support the former moderation action and the latter seems perhaps a tad heavyhanded, but 24h pass quickly.
[…]is this truly the noise that needs to be filtered for the greater good of Bitcoin? Or is this for the greater good of the maintainers?
I don’t think anyone is making claims about the moderation being for the benefit of Bitcoin, IMHO the moderation is for the benefit of all participants in that pull request. Collapsing repetitive and vacuous comments improves the signal ratio of the discussion and makes it easier for people to catch up to the content of the discussion.
I'd beg everyone involved to harden their skin in times of controversy, not engage in ad-hominem, but also not fight fire with fire in that regard: silencing people, especially former colleagues that didn't leave but were removed, carries across a bad vibe to the public. Perhaps, in an effort to find a middle ground, the moderation rules can be made much more explicit and reduced in scope?
IMHO, Bitcoin Core contributors generally have tough skin, and most don’t seem to have trouble sticking to "criticizing ideas instead of people". Working in public can be rough and frequently being wrong in public is humbling. That doesn’t mean that we need to subject ourselves to gratuitous abuse, or that it should be required for us to read dozens of crackerbarrel quality comments on every controversial topic to keep abreast of discussions.
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noise and distraction to our workday.
Isn't this one of the expected consequences of working on a project that is of such vital importance to the public? Who gets to define what is "noise," anyway?
I am not a software engineer, but my job also has "noise and distraction."
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