Re: [gentoo-project] Items for Council Agenda, May 14

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 6:08 AM, Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> But for regulating misbehaving operators who can trivially find a new
> identity to hide behind, these tools as presented so far seem a bit
> toothless.
>
> Unless this proposal suggests that all new senders are themselves,
> defacto-censored.
>

++

As many have pointed out, people can just get around bans by creating
new identities.  That won't be an issue for devs, but certainly it is
an issue for non-devs.

I don't really see the point in doing moderation unless it is
before-the-fact.  We'll just be playing whack-a-mole and making people
upset without actually changing anything.

Yes, doing it before the fact has both philosophical and practical
challenges.  We need to accept those and make a decision one way or
the other.  I think this is one of those cases where either decision
is better than compromise.  If we don't have the manpower to moderate
posts by non-devs then we shouldn't moderate them at all.  If we
consider it against our values then we shouldn't.

I also think we need to be consistent.  If we're going to moderate,
then do it everywhere, or at least be prepared to do it everywhere
without further debate when problems arise.  If we're not going to
moderate, then we should just embrace the results.  I think that
having more moderation on some forums than others just creates the
inevitable complaint on one forum when somebody can't post on another,
and we have no principle to fall back on.

> But if we set up a system where new contributors are defacto-censored, ...
> that's not really the sort of Gentoo I want to be part of.

Honestly, I think we'll lose people either way (and we probably have
been losing them for years with the status quo).  Certainly they'll be
different people, but there isn't really any hard data one way or the
other as to which will have the larger impact.  Trying to collect some
kind of data around preferences might help here, though I'm not sure
it will make anybody more/less happy with the outcome either way.

-- 
Rich