The unelected mods who resigned were refusing accountability being enforced by the elected steering committee, which tells you what you need to know about how the mods ran things.
It kind of doesn't tell us what we need (or want) to know. Or at least, its not clear to me what conclusion is right from that.
On its face, none of these players have accountability. With enough noise individuals could be pressured out from either group. And if either group makes wrong choices, the penalty is just removal.
It's messy; I don't see any obvious answers or conclusions.
I see it as a reduction in overhead in many ways. Right now moderation doesn’t fall under the elected structure that runs the rest of the project. Bringing it in line with everything else ought to result in less drama.
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.
Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
All large organisations have huge amounts of "useless" overhead. When this overhead is removed, you no longer have a large organisation. Sometimes, having a large organisation is worth the overhead: organisations quietly solve a great deal of issues. But, since they do this quietly, it can be hard to tell which issues they solve; and they loudly create a lot of issues, too. This means it can be hard to tell when they are or aren't worth it, and when organisational reform would actually be expected to improve things.
In my experience watching their mods over the years, they seem to have a big problem with other people having opinions they disagree with.
I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
And they're moderators, so, what they say is already "the law" (at least in their eyes) anyways... don't need a code of conduct to tell people the mods have the final say regardless.
> I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
I don't think the term "false flag" works that way, but it 110% is exactly that.
Consider how they frame the proposal to add other mods:
> intially phrased as a suggestion, with a stated goal of adding “diversity of opinion” and “tension” to the moderation team
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
> despite this suggestion being immediately rejected as destructive and misguided by the moderation team
Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
This is what you get when you have an unelected body that appoints its own successors and give it the power to enforce "conduct".
... Incidentally, this also perfectly describes the Python Software Foundation's "work groups" for their Code of Conduct (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter) and for "diversity and inclusion" (https://wiki.python.org/psf/DiversityandInclusionWG). (Actually, it seems like most of the work groups work this way.) I'm also amused at how both of these charters refer to "Folks" rather than, say "People". Seems to me like a clear signal of the intended culture, frankly.
> For reference, to my knowledge these words are pretty much interchangeable with "folks" being less formal I guess.
"folks" is indeed less formal, but there are other words in this category, such as "guys". The preference for "folks" is common among people who hold that "guys" is inherently sexist, and thus eventually becomes a signal of a particular perception of what kinds of sexism exist in the world and how sexism works. There are also those who believe that certain uses of "people" have become in some way or another problematic
In print contexts, some even further use this to signal especial interest in issues related to trans rights, by spelling it "folx". That requires the additional explanation that the "x" comes from analogy with other neologisms such as "latinx" that are intended not only to affirm gender neutrality but a non-binary view of gender. Because the reader is expected to recognize this, it functions as a sort of shibboleth.
As little as ten years ago, "folks" might have been judged as quaint or outdated language, used primarily by older people (https://hinative.com/questions/51383). It was largely repurposed for this social justice signaling.
Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
> Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
This is uh... well, seems a bit of a stretch to me. Not once in all my years saying "ya'll" have I ever even remotely put it in this framing, nor have I ever heard of anything like this.
> Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
My reading of that is they think it's inherently wrong to add people to the mod team because they disagree with their political views. Which seems reasonable to me.
Maybe, but it seems that might have been their deciding factor:
> despite the specific candidate being rejected as unsuitable by the moderation team, and agreement from SC that at least some of the reasons discussed were disqualifying
Why do these useless Wrong Think police keep inserting themselves in open source projects? No one wants the drama they bring to their projects. People are just trying to build software... Open source is not a platform for forcing political and social views on people, and not wanting to be a part of that isn't equivalent to opposing it.
If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
I'm sorry, but I don't really buy into these arguments.
If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
Unfortunately, people being people, political and social views will emerge. Also, people being people, any attempt by moderators to check these discussions will result in complaints, by one side or the other, about being silenced over "correct speak". It does not much matter which side of the social or political spectrum a person falls on.
> If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
As far as I can tell, this all ultimately started because a fringe of activists (aligned with this group of moderators, and possibly including them) within the community decided they didn't like the political implications of where the project got its funding.
Are you sure they would focus on technical matters if I did too? In a given community I can stick to technical matters, then on "my blog" I can write about my political positions.
There's one side that doesn't practically care about that, and then there's the other side that would want me not only removed from that community, cancelled, but even physically assaulted because apparently that's ok because I hold the "wrong" views so laws and human rights no longer apply.
Just to be clear: in some drama about one year ago the moderation team considered that people could be banned solely based on their political opinions if those happened to be right-wing / MAGA / anti-wokism.
Then the drama extended because people, even if they weren't right-wing/MAGA/anti-wokism had to agree with the moderators' political opinions.
So when TFA writes this:
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
What they really mean is: "We went so far left our brains left our bodies and we now consider anyone to the right of Stalin to be a nazi".
The organization of the government and its actions touch literally your entire life. From childhood nutrition to your job prospects and life expectancy.
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of.
Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially.
It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical.
But that means all we have is experiences and opinions about those experiences. Mix this with politics just being a group's opinion, and the fact that there's more than two people alive - what you get is that every opinion can be now considered a political opinion, and since all we have is opinions, "everything" is a political opinion, so "everything" is political [0].
I then find this stupid because it hard-misses the point of the colloquial usage of the word. By being overly universal, it functions either as just a useless segmentation, or as a pointless test in pedantry, a rhetorical sleight of hand. It also deals in a good amount of mind-reading, where those considering something a political opinion, rather than just a personal opinion, pretty much implicitly accuse the other person of groupthink, which is a really quite cheap accusation to make with no real argumentational benefit.
But maybe this is one of those rare cases where this definition does have its utility. Let's see.
[0] Except of course the matters of mathematical logic, which by virtue of being inherently virtual, once again walk away unscathed.
They also don't understand that everyone who disagrees with me is trying to eradicate me and people like me from existence, and is also racist (although we are both white and upper-middle class.) /s
Is that being up in arms about the usage of woks? I always knew it was a fairly controversial piece of kitchen equipment, but this is a concerning development.
HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.
This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.
Some random thoughts from the thread:
1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.
2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…
3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…
P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
> P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is?
The upset moderators are on the far left (per contemporary American conception of the spectrum). All of this fundamentally goes back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153 , if not further. (Even if I weren't familiar with the story, this would be my prior assumption by now.)
> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t
One of those is resigning, but for other reasons. I don't know about the last one.
> some arcane art that only experts can truly understand the intricacies of
I mean, it kinda is. It doesn't take long to get up to speed, if you have good teachers (I'd say 3 months), but I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces. (The problem's greater in the space without a culture of teaching the newbies.)
I know nothing about what's actually happening with NixOS, but I can imagine scenarios where the moderation team's in the right, the steering council is in the right, and where neither group is in the right, which would produce the observed evidence.
I edited the part you quoted (sorry! You were quick), but no fundamental disagreement on either point. I’d just say this in response:
1. Yeah it’s confusing, but keep scrolling — the last one is staying. Also the first one said that they’ll try to do mod stuff in their spare time, which tells me they aren’t really resigning
2. Moderation is certainly a skill, no doubt about it — just as policing is IRL. I just find the idea that it’s such an arcane skill that others couldn’t possibly have opinions about it or critically assess instances of it to be… hubristic?
3. Yes, I totally accept that the mod team might be fighting some sort of good fight here that’s separate from the procedural debate (where they’re clearly in the wrong). Still, even if that is the case: they’re not making that point very convincingly, at least for this outsider!
Re: political left/right, you’re stereotyping blithely in a way that doesn’t make sense on its own terms[1] that is disquieting to read, frankly. Been here 16 years and it’s the most oddly rabid political volley I’ve seen in a bit. I hope we have a strong firewall for this sort of thing.
[1] is the SC The Left because they are bureaucratic know-nothings? Is the mod The Left because they’re a big ol’ baby in public? Is the SC The Right because their politician's are seizing levers they don’t know how to control? Is the mod the right because they’re insisting they know better than anyone and aren’t subject to rules?
> I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc
Ofc? You just brought it up! You’d love to litigate it.
> quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there,
Make whom?
> the Python debacle.
Which? :P
> Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
Onlookers.
If so what?
What is sad about not knowing someone’s politics in a forum debacle?
3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.
Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
> [the SC response] is a good summary of the entire situation
It's unfathomable to me that they're even considering this:
> Are you asking for an elected body to be accountable to an unelected people. I don’t think this is entirely impossible, but it at least needs more thought put into it, and before taking any sort of bureaucratic approach, we should consider changing the governance culture, which is entirely within an SC’s power.
The fact that the moderators would resign and in the same breath call upon people they consider adversaries to resign as well, speaks to their character. As does the vague "Measures are in place to ensure essential capabilities are maintained." wording. This is blatantly a power grab by people who clearly already held far too much power.
> I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best.... Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
If the resigned members stay gone and get exactly nothing out of their appeals, I could maybe agree. It's fundamentally unhealthy to have moderation done by a self-appointing, ideologically filtering clique that's demonstrably at odds with a large portion of the community as well as their elected steering committee.
One of the reasons I stopped using Nix is how much more often I saw posts about political bickering than anything helpful.
I'm not aware of any other open source project so consumed with virtue signal bikeshedding.
The unelected mods who resigned were refusing accountability being enforced by the elected steering committee, which tells you what you need to know about how the mods ran things.
Good riddance, and easily enough replaced.
It kind of doesn't tell us what we need (or want) to know. Or at least, its not clear to me what conclusion is right from that.
On its face, none of these players have accountability. With enough noise individuals could be pressured out from either group. And if either group makes wrong choices, the penalty is just removal.
It's messy; I don't see any obvious answers or conclusions.
They should take a cue from sqlite and just adopt the Rule of St Benedict.
I am unfamiliar with the issues that led to this event.
Could someone point me to examples of controversial moderation decisions that were “interfered” with?
Explanation of the NixOS Steering Committee and NixOS Moderation Team (https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1nrsu9c/nixos_modera...):
> The Nix Steering Committee (SC) (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) is the elected community leadership body. It was established as part of the Nix governance constitution (https://github.com/NixOS/org/blob/main/doc/constitution.md) last year, after which the first elections were held, where 450 contributors voted for the current members. This years election (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announc...) is currently in progress. The SC generally is responsible over project direction and community matters, including management of teams. While most responsibilities are delegated, the SC has the authority to step in when necessary.
> The moderation team (https://nixos.org/community/teams/moderation/) was established before the SC or constitution existed. The initial moderators were appointed from RFC 102 (https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0102-moderati...), with the mandate to self-select successors. Over the years the team has changed members a lot, none of the initial members are part of it anymore, and the last larger rotation happened last year. The responsibilities include moderation according to the Code of Conduct (CoC) (https://github.com/NixOS/.github/blob/master/CODE\_OF\_CONDU...) of the official community spaces, which is mostly the Discourse and a bunch of Matrix channels. Earlier this year the now-existing SC took on the responsibility of approving new mod team members and CoC changes (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/code-of-conduct-and-moderation...).
This feels like a lot of political baggage for an open source project and a recipe for drama.
Is any of this overhead really needed? What does it accomplish?
(Serious question, maybe I’m just too dim to get it)
I see it as a reduction in overhead in many ways. Right now moderation doesn’t fall under the elected structure that runs the rest of the project. Bringing it in line with everything else ought to result in less drama.
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.
Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
How does your private fork work? Does that mean some flakes and packages for your own use, or you maintain patches that touch deeper into the system?
It mirrors the complexity of Nix and NixOS. Similar to Rust and all its community drama.
Idk, “there’s a group of people in charge and we elect them” seems like a pretty basic starting point for any community, not an over-complication!
Except the moderators are not elected but are self-appointing, and they were in place before the steering committee was created.
Right, so bringing that in line with the elected body, now that it exists, just seems like a sensible move.
All large organisations have huge amounts of "useless" overhead. When this overhead is removed, you no longer have a large organisation. Sometimes, having a large organisation is worth the overhead: organisations quietly solve a great deal of issues. But, since they do this quietly, it can be hard to tell which issues they solve; and they loudly create a lot of issues, too. This means it can be hard to tell when they are or aren't worth it, and when organisational reform would actually be expected to improve things.
In my experience watching their mods over the years, they seem to have a big problem with other people having opinions they disagree with.
I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
And they're moderators, so, what they say is already "the law" (at least in their eyes) anyways... don't need a code of conduct to tell people the mods have the final say regardless.
> I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
I don't think the term "false flag" works that way, but it 110% is exactly that.
Consider how they frame the proposal to add other mods:
> intially phrased as a suggestion, with a stated goal of adding “diversity of opinion” and “tension” to the moderation team
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
> despite this suggestion being immediately rejected as destructive and misguided by the moderation team
Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
This is what you get when you have an unelected body that appoints its own successors and give it the power to enforce "conduct".
... Incidentally, this also perfectly describes the Python Software Foundation's "work groups" for their Code of Conduct (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter) and for "diversity and inclusion" (https://wiki.python.org/psf/DiversityandInclusionWG). (Actually, it seems like most of the work groups work this way.) I'm also amused at how both of these charters refer to "Folks" rather than, say "People". Seems to me like a clear signal of the intended culture, frankly.
Can you elaborate on using "folks" instead of "people"? I'm unfamiliar with the difference as english is not my first language.
For reference, to my knowledge these words are pretty much interchangeable with "folks" being less formal I guess.
> For reference, to my knowledge these words are pretty much interchangeable with "folks" being less formal I guess.
"folks" is indeed less formal, but there are other words in this category, such as "guys". The preference for "folks" is common among people who hold that "guys" is inherently sexist, and thus eventually becomes a signal of a particular perception of what kinds of sexism exist in the world and how sexism works. There are also those who believe that certain uses of "people" have become in some way or another problematic
In print contexts, some even further use this to signal especial interest in issues related to trans rights, by spelling it "folx". That requires the additional explanation that the "x" comes from analogy with other neologisms such as "latinx" that are intended not only to affirm gender neutrality but a non-binary view of gender. Because the reader is expected to recognize this, it functions as a sort of shibboleth.
Possibly useful references: https://old.reddit.com/r/socialjustice101/comments/agozlt ; https://old.reddit.com/r/socialjustice101/comments/itiisx ; https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/523419/ ; https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gendered-language-hey-guys_l_...
As little as ten years ago, "folks" might have been judged as quaint or outdated language, used primarily by older people (https://hinative.com/questions/51383). It was largely repurposed for this social justice signaling.
Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
> Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.
This is uh... well, seems a bit of a stretch to me. Not once in all my years saying "ya'll" have I ever even remotely put it in this framing, nor have I ever heard of anything like this.
I was speaking from personal experience, but see e.g. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211119-why-more-peopl... and https://www.npr.org/2025/07/16/nx-s1-5467295/yall-word-histo... .
I like when the news takes a simple trend in a community and blows it out of proportion.
I bet there's news stories talking about how the finger guns meme is actually an act of silent protest or some such.
Using the casual “folks” in a context that would ordinarily be more formal is considered a bit more liberal I guess.
> Which is to say, they think it's inherently wrong to put people on the mod team who disagree with their political views, when they don't even moderate a space that's about politics.
My reading of that is they think it's inherently wrong to add people to the mod team because they disagree with their political views. Which seems reasonable to me.
> Which seems reasonable to me.
Surely the SC had other criteria in mind as well.
Maybe, but it seems that might have been their deciding factor:
> despite the specific candidate being rejected as unsuitable by the moderation team, and agreement from SC that at least some of the reasons discussed were disqualifying
Are you saying moderators should be chosen based on their political beliefs?
Why do these useless Wrong Think police keep inserting themselves in open source projects? No one wants the drama they bring to their projects. People are just trying to build software... Open source is not a platform for forcing political and social views on people, and not wanting to be a part of that isn't equivalent to opposing it.
If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
I'm sorry, but I don't really buy into these arguments.
If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
Unfortunately, people being people, political and social views will emerge. Also, people being people, any attempt by moderators to check these discussions will result in complaints, by one side or the other, about being silenced over "correct speak". It does not much matter which side of the social or political spectrum a person falls on.
> If open source communities stuck to technical matters, there would be little to no need for moderators to pass judgment on political or social views. Their primary role would be in conflict resolution over technical matters.
As far as I can tell, this all ultimately started because a fringe of activists (aligned with this group of moderators, and possibly including them) within the community decided they didn't like the political implications of where the project got its funding.
Lol these kids are like the HOA. Oh no you're resigning? Good riddance.
No. HOAs were established to give cover to post civil rights redlining.
Are you sure they would focus on technical matters if I did too? In a given community I can stick to technical matters, then on "my blog" I can write about my political positions.
There's one side that doesn't practically care about that, and then there's the other side that would want me not only removed from that community, cancelled, but even physically assaulted because apparently that's ok because I hold the "wrong" views so laws and human rights no longer apply.
Just to be clear: in some drama about one year ago the moderation team considered that people could be banned solely based on their political opinions if those happened to be right-wing / MAGA / anti-wokism.
Then the drama extended because people, even if they weren't right-wing/MAGA/anti-wokism had to agree with the moderators' political opinions.
So when TFA writes this:
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
What they really mean is: "We went so far left our brains left our bodies and we now consider anyone to the right of Stalin to be a nazi".
Some people just don't seem to understand that 1. Everything is political and 2. You can't tolerate intolerance.
> Some people just don't seem to understand that 1. Everything is political
To "understand" this, it would have to be correct.
The organization of the government and its actions touch literally your entire life. From childhood nutrition to your job prospects and life expectancy.
That is completely irrelevant to the point.
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of.
Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially.
It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical.
But that means all we have is experiences and opinions about those experiences. Mix this with politics just being a group's opinion, and the fact that there's more than two people alive - what you get is that every opinion can be now considered a political opinion, and since all we have is opinions, "everything" is a political opinion, so "everything" is political [0].
I then find this stupid because it hard-misses the point of the colloquial usage of the word. By being overly universal, it functions either as just a useless segmentation, or as a pointless test in pedantry, a rhetorical sleight of hand. It also deals in a good amount of mind-reading, where those considering something a political opinion, rather than just a personal opinion, pretty much implicitly accuse the other person of groupthink, which is a really quite cheap accusation to make with no real argumentational benefit.
But maybe this is one of those rare cases where this definition does have its utility. Let's see.
[0] Except of course the matters of mathematical logic, which by virtue of being inherently virtual, once again walk away unscathed.
Which intolerance is the "root" intolerance? For me it's not specified and can't be, so both sides use this argument and it means nothing.
They also don't understand that everyone who disagrees with me is trying to eradicate me and people like me from existence, and is also racist (although we are both white and upper-middle class.) /s
I vouched for this comment, but perhaps you could please phrase the last point more gently.
> anti-wokism
Is that being up in arms about the usage of woks? I always knew it was a fairly controversial piece of kitchen equipment, but this is a concerning development.
HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.
This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.
Some random thoughts from the thread:
1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.
2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…
3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…
P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
> It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered
Sadly, I don't think it's rare in the FOSS world these days.
> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.
I'd keep an eye out on social media to see what pressure the remaining mods face from those loyal to the resigning ones (including themselves).
> last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle
Everyone quieted down about it, but there was renewed tension in this year's elections thanks in large part to Franz Kiraly's efforts to reform the organization (ref. https://github.com/python-software-federation/psf2025 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103390 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103460 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103760 ; https://discuss.python.org/t/_/103776).
> P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is?
The upset moderators are on the far left (per contemporary American conception of the spectrum). All of this fundamentally goes back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153 , if not further. (Even if I weren't familiar with the story, this would be my prior assumption by now.)
> The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t
One of those is resigning, but for other reasons. I don't know about the last one.
> some arcane art that only experts can truly understand the intricacies of
I mean, it kinda is. It doesn't take long to get up to speed, if you have good teachers (I'd say 3 months), but I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces. (The problem's greater in the space without a culture of teaching the newbies.)
I know nothing about what's actually happening with NixOS, but I can imagine scenarios where the moderation team's in the right, the steering council is in the right, and where neither group is in the right, which would produce the observed evidence.
> I keep watching new moderators making the same mistakes over and over again, in a couple of online spaces.
Could you elaborate?
I edited the part you quoted (sorry! You were quick), but no fundamental disagreement on either point. I’d just say this in response:
1. Yeah it’s confusing, but keep scrolling — the last one is staying. Also the first one said that they’ll try to do mod stuff in their spare time, which tells me they aren’t really resigning
2. Moderation is certainly a skill, no doubt about it — just as policing is IRL. I just find the idea that it’s such an arcane skill that others couldn’t possibly have opinions about it or critically assess instances of it to be… hubristic?
3. Yes, I totally accept that the mod team might be fighting some sort of good fight here that’s separate from the procedural debate (where they’re clearly in the wrong). Still, even if that is the case: they’re not making that point very convincingly, at least for this outsider!
Re: political left/right, you’re stereotyping blithely in a way that doesn’t make sense on its own terms[1] that is disquieting to read, frankly. Been here 16 years and it’s the most oddly rabid political volley I’ve seen in a bit. I hope we have a strong firewall for this sort of thing.
[1] is the SC The Left because they are bureaucratic know-nothings? Is the mod The Left because they’re a big ol’ baby in public? Is the SC The Right because their politician's are seizing levers they don’t know how to control? Is the mod the right because they’re insisting they know better than anyone and aren’t subject to rules?
> I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc
Ofc? You just brought it up! You’d love to litigate it.
> quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there,
Make whom?
> the Python debacle.
Which? :P
> Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
Onlookers.
If so what?
What is sad about not knowing someone’s politics in a forum debacle?
1) this is not the entire moderation team
2) this post is a good summary of the entire situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th...
3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.
Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
> this is not the entire moderation team
I see five names. Who's remaining?
> [the SC response] is a good summary of the entire situation
It's unfathomable to me that they're even considering this:
> Are you asking for an elected body to be accountable to an unelected people. I don’t think this is entirely impossible, but it at least needs more thought put into it, and before taking any sort of bureaucratic approach, we should consider changing the governance culture, which is entirely within an SC’s power.
The fact that the moderators would resign and in the same breath call upon people they consider adversaries to resign as well, speaks to their character. As does the vague "Measures are in place to ensure essential capabilities are maintained." wording. This is blatantly a power grab by people who clearly already held far too much power.
> I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best.... Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
If the resigned members stay gone and get exactly nothing out of their appeals, I could maybe agree. It's fundamentally unhealthy to have moderation done by a self-appointing, ideologically filtering clique that's demonstrably at odds with a large portion of the community as well as their elected steering committee.