Tolerance [LWN.net]

Tolerance

Posted Aug 16, 2012 1:38 UTC (Thu) by duffy (guest, #31787)
In reply to: Tolerance by corbet
Parent article: Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters

I used to feel similarly about censorship. Over time my attitude has changed, after speaking with people in person who quietly bowed out of conversations and even whole projects because they felt unwelcome when a person making particularly unhelpful (but not usually egregiously offensive) comments on a regular basis was allowed to continue without admonishment.

Now I feel like not saying anything to the person whose behavior is allowed to continue unchecked will result in the censorship of the folks it scares away.

For whatever it's worth. A lot of times folks interpret silence from the perceived 'adults in the room' as consent. This is why - getting back to the topic at hand - a conference simply adopting an anti-harassment policy makes me feel a lot more comfortable about the conference. It makes it clear the organizers do not intend to tolerate the kind of funny business Val describes in the post.

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Tolerance

Posted Aug 16, 2012 8:44 UTC (Thu) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]

It's not just true for projects, but also webforums.

When was the last time John Carmack posted on Slashdot? How many Ubuntu developers post on OMG Ubuntu? How much interesting posts is there left on Planet GNOME?

I believe the quality of content on any site depends not only on the participants and the technology used, but also on the policies and behavior (or as others say: censorship) enforced by the maintainers.

Reddit and Slashdot do it by letting users vote on posts, Planet GNOME does it by selecting the people that may write new posts (gnomememes? commit digest?), Facebook and Twitter make you maintain your own view on the posts. LWN so far only displays the status and id of the poster to give you an idea wether you're posting to someone "important".