Moderation

[piscisaureus]

I noticed that in the discussion around #11 comments were removed.

After a while the discussion is locked and closed, but after a couple of days a participant with moderation abilities uses his power to make another comment which is part of the discussion, but to which no reply is possible.

My opinion on whether these comments needed to be deleted is beside the point, but I don't like the effects it had, nor do I agree with the way it was handled:

• Moderation was done by people with a strong opinion on the issue itself. This kills the credibility of the moderators and exposes the advisory board to (valid) concerns about censorship.
• There is no safety net to ensure that moderators don't overstep their limits. Even for advisory board members there is no way to tell what comments were removed, for what reason and by whom.
• What remains public are replies to comments that were removed, often containing an interpretation (or caricature) of the removed comment.

What I would like to suggest:

• Discussion participants don't moderate discussions, neither do people who are known to have a strong opinion about the topic of the debate.
• When comments are removed or edited, or people are banned, this is logged somewhere, including (where applicable) the name of the moderator, the offensive comment and reasons for moderation. It could be as simple as an e-mail to a group of people. (needs further detail)
• The moderator leaves a note in the thread clearly stating that moderation has happened and the motivation.
• Replies to deleted comments are also deleted.
• When a discussion is closed and locked, nobody is allowed to continue the discussion, not even the people that technically can. Only authoritative statements are allowed (e.g. "the discussion continues there" or "In the December 1st meeting the advisory has decided to do x").

[hackygolucky]

@piscisaureus I think this is an awesome suggestion. Accountability from everyone involved is encouraging to contributing in both communications and code. While I personally believe in the innate good of humans, removing real/perceived assumptions of power imbalance by having guidelines in place is helpful to making people feel they can speak. It may be useful to loop someone into this discussion that has experience in moderating or managing conflict. Is this something that @Danese could speak to?

Implementing things like

Discussion participants don't moderate discussions, neither do people who are known to have a strong opinion about the topic of the debate.

might be difficult, as we can almost all own having strong opinions when it comes to these discussions. That said, it should still be addressed, such as asking someone who has jumped into the fray to remove themselves as moderators for this particular round if they feel they can't remain objective.

Successful conflict management depends on ​regulating stress, emotional awareness, and nonverbal communication(this can include actions we take on projects). For this environment, I would argue regulating stress and emotional awareness translates to participants being respectful to the arguments presented. There can be differences in philosophies as well as cultural, so misunderstandings can be a learning moment if we're patient(and why I agree with the censorship being an issue). That said, I think some people would have argued it was not censorship but moderation. The issue I have with this is that moderation implies following a set of guidelines and that the comments removed violated such guidelines. Nonverbal communications are, as I've mentioned, actions that can be taken on this project or elsewhere and in this case I see the moderators were attempting to use the deletion of comments as a form of management. I can also see why it can be considered a form of abuse of that privilege, as from my perspective, the comments I read before they were deleted did not violate any guideline I'm aware of or CoC.

I appreciate the persistence in demanding transparency in as much of these discussions and processes as possible. When community members feel comfortable with commenting/helping because they know they will have a platform with which to speak without repercussion(so long as they abide by the guidelines set forth), we will be in a better place.

[mbonaci]

@piscisaureus @hackygolucky great stuff, thank you for that.

Are we really trying to make a better, more welcoming community? I'm sure that the thread discouraged many people from participating. Though being afraid of being publicly prosecuted for my opinion, I'll tell you why I think so. I'm not a native English speaker, so please, forgive me for the mistakes.

So someone dared to disagree with the overwhelming majority. I don't want to go into the merit of that discussion, that's irrelevant.

The majority, especially the ones with snark comments on twitter, basically showed the guy a door, without him doing anything against the CoC, as it currently stands in my inbox. I remember one cowardly tweet (from a "pro-CoC" cheerleader guy - I don't remember anyone being against-CoC) being something like, and I'm paraphrasing:

I'll give a star to anyone who tells him inside the thread to go f__ himself".

It's not the tweet that particularly bothers me (I don't know the guy). It's the fact that no one had told the author that his behavior is the very reason the CoC should exist.

If we're fighting for inclusivity, we did a terrible job at the very beginning. Locking down the thread was a weak move. It basically said that you don't need us. You can easily agree on anything amongst yourselves, as you showed in the subsequent threads (ever wondered why only a couple of people participated and no one else dared to help out?). These two posts above really made me proud and encouraged me to write this reactionary post.

What we need is equality, total openness and cool heads.

I don't want a dictator (even a benevolent one) for a leader, I want someone who will be brave and cool headed enough to stand against the tide. The characteristic that @piscisaureus has manifested more than once. That's what a sheriff in old western movies would do, when people would barge in with a rope (that's what twitter looked like to me that day).

I see the CoC as the way to protect weaker amongst us. So what were we doing? IMHO, we were selective (although @mikeal did a pretty good job being civil).

Isn't this tweet a perfect fit for the situation (though intended otherwise).

I want to contribute to the node advisory CoC discussion, but I won't because I don't think my opinion will matter or that I'll be heard.

— Raquel Vélez (@rockbot) November 15, 2014

That's what your actions @isaacs left behind. At least that's how I feel (and I'm still writing this - not because I'm brave, but because I'm a fool). So maybe you should stick to technical stuff while at TC and refrain yourself from further moderation. As a matter of fact, TC should reprimand this kind of bully behavior (if we really want to stand by CoC).

Needless to say, my vote for making Bert's proposition a hard rule.

@mikeal, I'll one more time request that the TC videos be public from the get go. Why are those first two videos still private (while being accessible from another source)? The quality is perfectly fine. We can always make a rule that if anything goes wrong with recording TC publishes word-to-word transcript of the missing parts. That should be a small sacrifice for what's in stake. Making TC sessions private because of quality looks to me like a cop out. So what if bloggers and news sites write about all of this? What are we exactly scared of? Joyent's reputation or what?

And only one more thing, I promise. I'd like to see a blog post describing what happened (node-forward, fork), how the controversy started, who made threats with lawsuits and so on. IMHO, that should be TC's duty. Are you "protecting us" from something (that's the usual excuse)? At least you owe us an explanation as to why a small minority knows the whole story.

Excuse my tone. Perhaps it sounds a bit irritated. Well, you guessed it right, I am a bit irritated (I already asked many of these questions with no proper response in sight).

Would you feel welcome?

I don't want this to turn into that, so please, only posts of support and love here : )

[isaacs]

@mbonaci Your comment contains a lot of issues that are completely unrelated to the original post in this thread, and a few of them are related to other threads that are already open. Please try to stay on topic. If there are not already open threads for those issues, then you can create them easily enough.

@piscisaureus There are a lot of problems with your suggestion here.

First, "censorship" is precisely the wrong term to be using here. "Censorship" is what happens when an external force prevents members of a community from speaking in their own spaces, using force to create a chilling effect. What you're seeing here is moderation, which is much different. "Moderation" is what happens when the owners of a space exert editorial control over what goes on in that space. It's the difference between throwing a troublemaker out of your bar, vs attacking the patrons of a bar you don't care for.

As one of the moderators of this space, you are of course welcome to have opinions about how the moderation is being done. We ought to decide a strategic policy for which people we want to hear from.

I phrase it this way because it is a choice. We cannot actually be "inclusive" of all people, because there are people whose very presence will chase away others.

Second, suggesting that we only have "cool headed" moderators who don't have a strong opinion about the subject, is asking a lot, when the subject is "should we or should we not have a policy against harassment". If we judge comments merely on the merit of their content, and we ignore the flags that the author is waving, we still create chilling effects with our behavior.

There is no way out of the choice. Do we want women and minorities participating in Node.js, or not? That actually is the question, and it informs very different strategies about how we moderate this space. Do we protect disadvantaged minorities in tech from harassment, or do we protect harassers from criticism?

I do not see any value in even engaging in a question of what is "fair". There is no "fair" here. There is only what we do, and what happens as a result. Desired results should inform actions.

If we create a safe space for those who advertise their desire to harass women, we create an unsafe space for women to participate. That choice will send a message to others who are disproportionately victimized by online harassment. This is a hard multiple-choice test. There is no compromise.

When a serial stalker shows up, who has stated publicly that he intends to harass all women out of technology, and has made credible threats of violence in the past, this prevents women from participating, because they fear for their safety if they do. That chilling effect, preventing discussion by the threat of force, that is in fact "censorship".

We've done a really great job making a safe place for privileged white men to participate in an open source project. I think Node.js can benefit by expanding its demographic. But it means we get comfortable with heavy-handed moderation in some cases. This isn't a public street corner. This is our house. It isn't just our right to decide who plays here, it's our duty.

Third, it's worth mentioning that locking an issue does not in any way alert someone who is in the middle of typing a response. What should we do if an issue is locked while we are writing something, and then of course it lets us post our update because we're a collaborator? Perhaps we need some kind of moderator backchannel?

I'd be happy giving up my collaborator bit here, but as we saw last weekend, we need all the help we can get to moderate these issues when discussions get out of hand. In fact, I think we need to add more collaborators (@mikeal and @othiym23 spring to mind, perhaps others?)

My sense is that it is unwise to even try discussing some of these subjects on GitHub issues at least until we have a CoC and maybe even a full-fledged moderation strategy in place.

[othiym23]

My sense is that it is unwise to even try discussing some of these subjects on GitHub issues at least until we have a CoC and maybe even a full-fledged moderation strategy in place.

I agree with this. Not because I dislike disagreement or don't want community involvement, but because certain topics are attractive nuisances for people acting in bad faith. My experience last weekend left me very frustrated with my inability to create a space where people could credibly disagree with each other without feeling exposed or unsafe.

Tellingly, I received far more feedback from actual Node users and contributors in private than on the issue itself (both for and against what I was proposing), and I received a number of messages telling me that people (largely, but not entirely, women) were uncomfortable participating (or flat-out unwilling to participate) in the discussion because of the presence of some of the commenters on the issue. I'm not sure the result was a productive use of anybody's time.

[mikeal]

IMO we should also add a rule that comments made by anonymous users be deleted immediately regardless of their content.

[mikeal]

After a while the discussion is locked and closed, but after a couple of days a participant with moderation abilities uses his power to make another comment which is part of the discussion, but to which no reply is possible. When a discussion is closed and locked, nobody is allowed to continue the discussion, not even the people that technically can. Only authoritative statements are allowed (e.g. "the discussion continues there" or "In the December 1st meeting the advisory has decided to do x").

Didn't realize this had happened, +1 on a policy change to address it.

Can't we just say "once an issue is locked nobody can comment, even moderators." If there any final statement or comments like "the discussion continues" they can be added before locking the issue or you can simply reference the issue in another GitHub issue and the reference will show up in the timeline.

[netpoetica]

Potential verbiage, maybe a starting point, for some official policy on this:

"When a thread is closed/locked by moderators, the only response which may follow will be one official response defining the single position of all collective board members, if necessary. This response may or may not include 1) a reason for why the thread was closed instead of deleted, 2) the perceived value of keeping the thread available to the community, 3) the behaviors that caused the thread to be closed. The goal of this final message is to improve the quality of future posts."

I agree/+1 on once a thread is closed or locked, no one should comment, but I also think there is an opportunity there to clarify expectations of behavior of individuals participating in the community

[rlidwka]

First, "censorship" is precisely the wrong term to be using here. "Censorship" is what happens when an external force prevents members of a community from speaking in their own spaces, using force to create a chilling effect. What you're seeing here is moderation, which is much different.

Removing comments made by one side of the discussion while approving similar ones made by another side is a definition of censorship. Based on comments of three different people, I think this is what had been happening there.

My sense is that it is unwise to even try discussing some of these subjects on GitHub issues at least until we have a CoC and maybe even a full-fledged moderation strategy in place.

... And CoC with its overly broad scope just provides a legal ground for this in the future.

No matter what you write, there will always be some people who are offended by it. Here is a nice blog post about that. If one of them is a woman, that's a technical CoC violation. I might be overestimating, but large amount of existing posts might be counted as one.

It isn't about "privileged white males" versus "marginalized women". It's about people who share similar opinions with current moderator versus those, who don't. Comments mentioning opposing point of view could be deleted quickly as CoC violations, and people who are offended by others will have to go all the way to TC trying to prove they are offensive.

(in this comment "you" refers to any ordinary participant of the discussion)

[rlidwka]

IMO we should also add a rule that comments made by anonymous users be deleted immediately regardless of their content.

Well, this surely is discriminatory to people who refuses to publish their real names. I know a few who refused to sign node.js CLA in the past only because of the necessity to publish private info.

But there is another concern about this. Who are anonymous users exactly? If you have a random nickname with a default avatar, you are one; and if you have a real-looking two-part name, you're good to go? This doesn't sound right.

It only would make sense to filter people with zero github repositories (who allegedly created their accounts only to post in the particular thread). But we all started from there, so it would filter good people out as well.

[piscisaureus]

It isn't my intention to discuss the subject matter that was discussed in #11. Neither do I want question @isaacs's good faith. But I'd welcome you to agree with me that the debate in #11 was not effective, which means that "we" (the advisory board) need to do things differently the next time.

When moderation is done by a discussion participant or someone that is suspected to have a particular "preoccupation" in the debate, this opens the door for questioning the motives of the moderator, and quickly turns a discussion in which moderation happened into a discussion about moderation. That's an effect we like to avoid.

The other suggestions I made are to be seen in the same light. Clear accountability creates trust in the process and it provides a venue where disagreement with concrete moderative actions can be appropriately discussed.

This is why I'm proposing that policy. It puts moderators above suspicion, pretty the same as the (generally uncontroversial) practice of having judges and jurors not judge their family members, and that we are weary that lawmakers might have conflict of interest.

When decisions are made on topics that are highly controversial, a large number of people will eventually have to put up with practices and policies that they don't (completely) agree with but still have strong feelings about. Knowing that a contended outcome is at least the result of proper process makes this much easier.

Hopefully the next contentious discussion will be about something completely unrelated. It might be coroutines or promises or rlimits or whether heavy drinking is acceptable at a family friendly conference.

@mikeal

IMO we should also add a rule that comments made by anonymous users be deleted immediately regardless of their content.

I don't really see a reason to at this point, but I'd like to hear your arguments in favor.

EDIT: I've changed the topic title to "moderation" and removed "censorship" to be more neutral. EDIT: removed "due to trolling or moderation" from the first paragraph.

[mbonaci]

May I respectfully propose that we consider adding a leadership code of conduct to the CoC (or even as a separate document).

Like the one from Ubuntu perhaps. A thing like that can IMHO only benefit the community.

[xk]

Hey, here's a contribution in the spirit of the CoC https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/8833 . Hope you like it!