Extend oversight in moderation policy with rules to deal with persistent conflict of interest

[ariard]

This issue is a follow-up of #3 on conflict of interest rules.

While moderation rules now mention rules to deal with conflict of interest in oversight (#7), there has been no mention of rules on what do to if there are persistence conflict of interests among regular contributors to the bitcoin core project. There has been a proposition with https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/commit/05cd245c0227af81535e9adb37b1f8f1ca725be1. E.g a moderator could abuse of its own permissions to arbitrary defavor another contributor, as the organization entities they belong to have competing business interest.

I think there is a historical example of interest, during the block size “war”, Jeff Garzik who was a maintainer at that time was on the payroll of a company called Bloq, while at the very same time some other contributors were on the payroll of Blockstream. Both companies were in the business of providing blockchain infrastructure, and have raised millions of dollars from external investors, so they were under fiduciary duties to deliver on.

[pinheadmz]

You will have to define "persistent conflict of interests" to get any traction with this. We will also need a way to moderate policy abusers who simply claim they have such a conflict with everyone in the community / organization / species / universe.

I'm afraid we will end up in an infinite loop of circumstantial claims.

example: Contributor claims moderator's employer's lawyer has sent them a letter. Moderator claims employer has not instructed them to moderate any contributor any differently than the written policy already instructs them to and in fact employer rarely ever instructs moderator to do anything specific at all, ever.

Besides a boundless waste of time by a limited set of full time bitcoin core contributors, the worst case here is that a maintainer restricts or removes a moderator and then we are back to where we were in April: contributors and maintainers are distracted by unproductive comments on GitHub that impedes development progress.

[ryanofsky]

I don't understand what problems 05cd245c0227af81535e9adb37b1f8f1ca725be1 is supposed to solve.

Are moderators deleting posts that should not be deleted or breaking with guidelines in another way other way due to conflicts of interest?

Are there potential discussion participants who are intimidated or discouraged from posting because of conflicts of interest?

Are there outside observers who are losing trust in the development process due to conflicted decision making, and adding a conflict section could be a step towards regaining their trust and esteem?

I feel like whatever problem 05cd245c0227af81535e9adb37b1f8f1ca725be1 is trying to solve there has got to be a better of way of solving it than having the project maintain a list of potential conflicts of interests and creating different rules for different moderators.

[ariard]

You will have to define "persistent conflict of interests" to get any traction with this. We will also need a way to moderate policy abusers who simply claim they have such a conflict with everyone in the community / organization / spec ies / universe.

I'm afraid we will end up in an infinite loop of circumstantial claims.

I think the historical example I gave above about Bloq vs Blockstream asymmetric commercial interests illustrates well the notion of persistence.

Even by the time of the block size war, the bitcoin core project was already about technical ideas, implementing code and testing / reviewing. What were the asymmetric commercial interests of the two susbset of regular contributors belonging either to Bloq and Blockstream circa 2015 / 2016 should not have been a subject of concern for the remaining bitcoin core contributors, yet it might have influenced the exercise of maintenance rights by that time. I have some versions of what did happen from some Blockstream folks and beyond, though one could ask Jeff Garzik for more, the guy had a track record in contributing to operating system world before hacking on bitcoin.

About what to do about policy abusers who simply claim they have such a conflict with everyone in the community / organization / species / universe / other riemannian universes, I think it's easy for the moderators, they can ask themselves if there is substance backing each claim, like it's done by courts of justice in evaluating a legal claim. How to proceed exactly and formalize that in the rules ? It's a matter of discussions, I can come with suggestions.

About running in an infinite loop of circumstancial claims, ain't what about life ? As was saying the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, who has fled Spain during the Civil War in the 1930s, “Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias". I don't have understanding of Spanish, though from its translation in other langages, I think in English it means "I am I and my circumstance" and I'll let you mediate more on it...

example: Contributor claims moderator's employer's lawyer has sent them a letter. Moderator claims employer has not instructed them to moderate any contributor any differently than the written policy already instructs them to and in fact employer rarely ever instructs moderator to do anything specific at all, ever.

Besides a boundless waste of time by a limited set of full time bitcoin core contributors, the worst case here is that a maintainer restricts or removes a moderator and then we are back to where we were in April: contributors and ma> intainers are distracted by unproductive comments on GitHub that impedes development progress.

It's all on the "rarely", something happening "rarely" can nevertheless have a significant impact.

I think I have the list of Blockstream co-founders from 2014 who had effectively a conflict of interest management provision in their work contracts, which were allowing to exit with financial compensations if their employer instructed them to commit something which was "immoral" towards Bitcoin, people who had maintenance rights in the past.

I think if there is an interesting lesson of the block size war, it's more thinking about a subset of regular contributors, which were tied by common financial interests, that have progressively get the hands on github repository administration and other auxiliaries to more or less influence their technical viewpoint about small blocks. And then once having the hands on github and other communication channels, arrogated themselves to judge what were "distractive" or "unproductive" comments in the realization of the small block idea. It's not like after few years of more technical ruminations that bitcoin scalability picture is more complex than doing a coin toss between 1MB block or 1 TB block...

[ariard]

Are moderators deleting posts that should not be deleted or breaking with guidelines in another way other way due to conflicts of interest?

I believe it was one of the complaint of Peter Todd as expressed on the mailing list about its mempoolfullrbf PR in July of this year, that it has been closed in a less than fully neutral fashion, or at least a bit fast...

Are there potential discussion participants who are intimidated or discouraged from posting because of conflicts of interest?

I'm not in people shoes...though yeah during all the mempoolfullrbf discussions in 2022, there were some proponents of the status quo (i.e not introducing full-rbf and favoring 0-conf transactions), some who were vendoring wallets with real-world traffic that seems a bit lost if they could post their viewpoint, which was necessarily clashing with what was can be technically justified best for lightning.

Are there outside observers who are losing trust in the development process due to conflicted decision making, and adding a conflict section could be a step towards regaining their trust and esteem?

I think has been outside observers who have been losing trust in the development process of the bitcoin core project due to conflicted decision making since the early days of the OG bitcoin foundation, and the subsequent spurs of Blockstream.

I feel like whatever problem 05cd245 is trying to solve there has got to be a better of way of solving it than having the project maintain a list of potential conflicts of interests and creating different rules for different moderators.

I think you're pointing out well the crux of the issue. I agree with you that we don't wish to create different moderation rules for different moderators, on the other hand I think we're assuming moderation is mostly done by human beings, with different walk of life. So they can have for sure potential conflicts of interests and let some bias being expressed, it’s human nature. If you're familiar with US law system, it's not for nothing that "voir dire", i.e juree selection can be a complex process...