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Tim Peters returns to the Python community

By Jake Edge
December 23, 2024

In the past, suspensions of Python core developers have effectively been permanent because the recipients of the punishment chose not to return. Things have played out quite differently after Tim Peters was suspended for three months back in August; Peters has been posting to the Python discussion forum since his suspension ended in early November and, generally, getting back to work as usual. That does not mean that he—or others in the community—have accepted the way he was treated, but he has largely made his peace with it. The incident is still reverberating through the Python world, however.

Back

On November 1, Peters posted in the thread that announced his suspension, noting that his "ban is history now" and that he did not plan to post further about the ban in that topic; "I'll pick over its bones in my blog instead." He did link to an apology of sorts on his blog, though in another post said that the "mea culpa" does not "apologize for claimed violations I also find baseless".

The violations that he refers to show up in the announcement of his suspension by the steering council (SC); it is a list of ten items specifying "repeated violations of the following behaviors expected by the Code of Conduct". That list is controversial, at best; so far, no real evidence for, or defense of, most or all of those claimed violations has been offered. While Peters said that he had changed his posting style in light of the suspension, that list still clearly sticks in his craw:

Instead I've totally changed my posting style, which I agree was taken far too often in unintended ways, which I was oblivious to for reasons explained there.

So I too think the ban had some good outcomes. But they could have been achieved far more easily with far less community-damaging drama, and with no broadcasting of shrill, demonizing defamations. Those were raw assertions, with no links to supporting evidence at all. Like it or not, "just trust us" is broken now for a much larger share of the community.

During the suspension, especially right after it, there was quite a bit of discussion in the announcement thread, much of it centered around requests to clarify or explain the list of "charges". The SC as a whole has never commented on those requests or the uproar around the suspension in general, though some individual members have posted thoughts in that thread along the way, including Gregory P. Smith (twice) and Emily Morehouse, who was quoted in our earlier article. But things soon died down.

On October 1, the topic was raised again when Ethan Furman posted a link to a blog post from Peters that set out "to eliminate the 'information asymmetry' that usually accompanies a ban, by disclosing my interactions with PSF [Python Software Foundation] representatives in full". It paints a damning picture of the actions of various bodies, though it is obviously one-sided. The facts it lays out are seemingly not in dispute—or at least have not been disputed publicly—and indicate that the Code of Conduct Work Group (CoC WG) may not have even followed its own procedures.

From what Peters says on that page, the only contact he had during the entire process leading up to his ban was a single message from the SC, which Morehouse also mentioned in her post; "we did discuss this directly with the person first as an initial corrective measure where the feedback was not received and no willingness to listen or improve was indicated (in fact, doubling down on issues we were trying to address occurred)". As might be guessed, Peters has a significantly different take on what was said, though he does admit to being dismissive of that message, in part because the specific example given "didn't pass a 'reasonable person' test to me". He will not release the email exchange without SC permission, but he claims that the message was fairly vague other than the one example:

Without specificity, the best I could make of it was "we're not objecting to what you're saying, we're objecting to who you are - become someone different, in ways you must already know we have in mind". It left both sides unmoved, but they didn't reply to my reply, so there was no "discussion". It was a one-time exchange of monologues.

Unsurprisingly, Furman's post led to more outcry, some of which was flagged by readers, thus hidden by the Discourse forum software until moderators could change that status if it is warranted. The volume of complaints caused the thread to automatically be shut down for four hours on two occasions as well. When he returned, Peters posted in the thread and encouraged others to politely do so as well; when the topic of his ban came up in other threads, he tried to head them off and suggest that the discussion stay in that one thread.

Changing CoC enforcement

One of those other threads was started on November 21 by Marc-André Lemburg to discuss moving enforcement of the CoC away from the SC. It is an idea that he raised in the thread on Furman's call for a vote of no confidence in the SC back in August. Two SC members, Pablo Galindo Salgado and Barry Warsaw, seemed favorably inclined toward the idea. The SC is only involved in enforcement for core developers; the CoC WG and PSF board do that work for other members of the Python community. As part of his note, Warsaw revealed that he had abstained from the vote on the suspension, in part because he did not feel he could be unbiased; similarly, CoC WG members Brett Cannon and Łukasz Langa abstained from the vote to recommend the suspension to the SC.

Lemburg's proposal to change PEP 13 ("Python Language Governance") would make a few small changes to clearly move CoC enforcement away from the SC. What it did not do, however, was to indicate who would be in charge of CoC enforcement for core developers instead, which many saw as a fatal flaw. Lemburg acknowledged that problem and shortly thereafter put the proposal on hold "until we have fleshed out a better proposal to fill in the gap that is created by removing the CoC responsibility from the SC".

As might be guessed, though, Peters's suspension came up in that thread. Langa suggested that the proposal was solely in reaction to the suspension of Peters, though Mark Hammond pointed out that he (and likely others) are responding to a few different incidents over the past six months or so. In response to Langa's suggestion that "if you feel this decision was incorrect, we should definitely discuss", Hammond's reply sums up some of the frustration that is being felt:

Haven't people been trying to do that? People tried to discuss them but were told there was "information asymmetry", that information individuals were "personally privy" to and respecting the privacy of impacted individuals mean we can't know the full story and we should just trust the [process]. But when other parties shared their side of this asymmetry, directly contradicted the small amount of information which was released and gave their permission to have an open discussion, the response has been either silence or more stonewalling.

So yes, we should continue to discuss this - but in my opinion, the onus is now on the SC to directly address some of the responses made by these individuals.

SC member Thomas Wouters, who announced the suspension back in August, said that he did not respond because "having a he-said/he-said fight would in no way improve the situation"; beyond that, neither he nor the SC as a whole were formally asked for a response. Peters wondered how he could engage in the discussion that Langa offered; he has made lots of overtures, but has been repeatedly met with silence.

So you can perhaps understand why I find "we should definitely discuss" disingenuous too. If "we" means PSF representatives, they certainly appear to be utterly determined to never clarify anything about my case.

Smith replied to Hammond and to Peters, saying that the SC replying either publicly or to Peters directly "would be a waste of our precious volunteer time as it was guaranteed to be taken out of context and satisfy nobody". Thus silence:

Silence because it was very clear that many people in the space were not up for a discussion. They had already made up their minds and were just looking for a fight. Repeating many of the same problems that led to the situation in the first place.

The only winning move was not to reply.

After a request from Alex Gaynor to take the specific circumstances of the suspension to a more appropriate thread, Peters took the topic to the thread where he had been trying to concentrate the discussion of his ban. Unlike the thread about removing CoC enforcement from the duties of the SC, the suspension discussion is in the PSF category, where anyone can post to it. That can lead to more contentious threads than those where only core developers can post, so some have said they shy away from posts in that category.

Of course, the conversation continued at some length—and rancor. Eventually, the thread was put into "slow mode" by the moderators so that folks could not post more than once per day. Peters said that his goal is not to argue against his ban at this point, but that there are some larger issues that he is pushing:

The only thing I'm still on about is that list of specific claimed "CoC violations". They appear nearly wholly without merit to me, are widely (in & out of PSF members) disbelieved by many, and will follow me the rest of my life. That's wrong, in so many ways, and the processes that let it come to this are dead broken on the face of it. They need to change, not particularly for my sake, but for the future health of this fracturing community.

Langa, who chairs the CoC WG, said that he had received a request from Peters on November 4 to redact or revise the list of violations, but the group had not yet had time to consider it. The next meeting was scheduled for December 6; "We will discuss it, I doubt it will be controversial. It just takes time." At the time of this writing, the list remains in place in the SC announcement; in truth, that list has now been quoted, in full or in part, in lots of other places, including other Python forum posts. That toothpaste is not going back into the tube.

To work

Since his return, Peters has been busy in other ways too. He proposed a change to Python syntax in the Ideas category; it would allow some simplification for search loops by adding an if_break to loop constructs to handle the "if found" case. As he noted, it is "just a 'nice to have'", but could be fairly easily added if someone wanted to do so. While it does not look like the idea is going anywhere, it did spark a lively (and polite) discussion of the feature and some possible alternatives.

In addition, he has been coordinating an effort to standardize the tie-breaking algorithm for the recently adopted Bloc Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR) voting mechanism that will be used for SC elections starting in 2025. (Lots more information about STAR and Bloc STAR can be found at STAR Voting, which is run by the Equal Vote Coalition). Smith had suggested considering a different voting mechanism for the SC back in August; the approval-voting method that has been used up through 2024 has a number of shortcomings because voters do not get to fully specify their preferences.

It turns out that Peters had continued participating in Python in the background during his suspension. In the voting-mechanism discussion, Guido van Rossum noted that one of the voting-system experts for Python was currently suspended, but that message was hidden by Discourse for some number of hours due to being flagged as "inappropriate". It was only restored after Langa intervened, though apparently another Discourse moderator chose not to restore it because they felt that Van Rossum was not being a good role model in the post; more details are available from Peters.

After that event, Van Rossum evidently decided to educate himself on voting systems and turned to Peters for a crash course. In addition, Smith posted an approval of Bloc STAR from Peters in the thread where the vote to switch was made. All of that took place during the suspension, so it would seem that it was only Peters's ability to post to Discourse and to commit code to the Python repositories on GitHub that were actually prevented by the ban.

Once Bloc STAR had been approved, Van Rossum wanted to find a provider offering that mechanism. He noted that Python core developer Larry Hastings has a starvote package that tabulates votes, but Hastings said that he is not the right person to run a voting service. Van Rossum also found bettervoting.com, which is run by the Equal Vote Coalition; it provides an AGPLv3-licensed star-server project and a site that hosts simple elections, which might be sufficient for an SC election.

Peters was quick to endorse bettervoting.com as the most likely site for their needs. He went on to run a few test elections and engaged with Hastings and Arend Peter Castelein, who is the production lead at Equal Vote, on a standard for breaking ties in a repeatable fashion. Ties are an unlikely, but possible, outcome of STAR voting, but it is important that voters (and observers) can recreate the results from the set of anonymized ballots.

Moving forward

So Peters is back to doing the kinds of things he has always done in the Python community, which is clearly to the good, and the suspension is largely in his rear-view mirror, but the wider Python community is still completely in the dark about a lot of things. As Peters himself pointed out, though, the prolonged, likely everlasting, silence is a common institutional response to incidents of this sort. One hopes that some lessons have been learned, however, by people on all "sides" and at all levels of the power hierarchy. What seems to be lacking, however, is what the community itself should learn from this incident about CoC enforcement, procedures, and reporting, especially as it relates to core developers. Maybe that will come in time, as well.


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Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 23, 2024 22:23 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (24 responses)

In prior stories, I have lamented the tendency of FOSS and other internet communities to be actively hostile to moderation of any kind, especially when a more established person comes under scrutiny. I continue to hold that belief, but I feel in this case that the SC's handling of the situation, at least from an outsider's perspective, looks quite poor.

But rather than focusing on who was right and who was wrong, I think it would be more helpful to discuss better moderation processes. Here are some general principles that I think moderators should try to adhere to:

0. Moderation decisions should be accompanied by a written rationale, which should be finalized before the moderation action is implemented.
1. If the sanctioned* person wants the moderation rationale to be public, then it should be public. Whether the moderation rationale is public in other cases is up to the preferences of the community and the people moderating it, but there should be a consistent rule. If the rationale is not public, it must at least be given to the sanctioned person directly. If you're going to do non-public rationales, I would also recommend having some kind of "escape hatch" rule that allows the moderation team to immediately publish the rationale if the sanctioned person publicly questions it.
2. Moderation rationales should be written to stand up to scrutiny. They should contain evidence, if evidence is public, or else they should describe non-public evidence to the extent possible. They should not simply consist of a bare assertion that the sanctioned person did something wrong, or just a list of rules that were broken. Ideally, a rationale should answer all reasonable questions that the community might ask about the moderation action.
3. For serious penalties, such as an extended ban from the community, moderation actions should be ratified by multiple people, and there should be a formal or semi-formal process for ratification (i.e. you can't just get a bunch of random moderators in a chat room together and play it by ear). The names of the people ratifying a decision should be attached to the rationale, unless exceptional circumstances demand that ratification be done by secret ballot (which should be rare or nonexistent).
4. The use of non-public evidence is heavily disfavored. Moderators should try to obtain public evidence or ask for permission to publish non-public evidence. In marginal cases, where there's no long-term pattern of behavior, prefer to do nothing rather than relying on non-public information for a moderation action.
5. Moderators routinely need to ban spammers and other low-effort participants who are "obviously" not contributing anything. These rules can be relaxed in cases like that, but care must be taken to ensure that anyone who is trying to participate in good faith does not get swept up into this category.

* "Sanctioned" - See Merriam-Webster's verb entry for "sanction," sense 3b: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction#dicti...

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 24, 2024 8:32 UTC (Tue) by gmgod (guest, #143864) [Link] (8 responses)

Not sure if moderation itself would have solved anything here. I'm not saying it's not important: if you want a well behaved community, you need some sort of thought police, i.e. moderation.

The more I read about the debacle though, the more I find people socially inept. At which point do people stop going to mommy/daddy to complain that someone has been mean to them instead of telling that person they found what they said disturbing or offending? It's online so even the most paranoids who think even a hint of dissension will award them a knife stab can't use that excuse.

At what point do mommy/daddy stop considering that the one who whines must be a victim, and must be "protected" of I'm not sure what by hiding both their identity and complaint from public view.

People need to grow up. It's really not fun to be surrounded by kids all the time, especially not at work!

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 24, 2024 10:37 UTC (Tue) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link] (2 responses)

Not "thought police".

Past a certain size communities do need authority figures, but they need to be respected elders who can lead by example, and with the quality of their ideas - not by quashing dissent.

The "socially inept" part does seem not entirely inappropriate, given that our communities reason for existence is _code_; that's where we spend the majority of our time and we're all a bit under-socialized. But that's a challenge to recognize and face, not something to lament. We're damn good at what we do (and perhaps our socialization isn't all bad, perhaps we're better at getting along in other ways).

But more and more I find myself thinking, after reflecting on how the kernel operates and watching my own (small!) community grow, that a lot of this does stem from a lack of leadership. I've seen a lot of maintainers with the attitude of "I don't want to be bothered with that, I have enough to do (and perhaps I'm afraid of not being listened to and being bad at it)". But the alternative is worse; when maintainers (i.e. the people who have that community respect) don't want to step in and offer guidance in tense situations you get people (CoC boards) attempting to fill the gap, under equipped for the job - and then they feel the need to be overly heavy handed; they can't be seen as soft and ineffectual.

And then we get messes like this.

Besides the obvious problems with being overly heavy handed, I think there's a real problem with any kind of management or authority that's done on a superficial level, and that's sort of what we've got going on, with the way CoC boards do things. Overly focused on "are we using nice words? do we _seem_ to be getting along?" while passive aggressive stonewalling goes unchecked - and tone policing in general seems to be getting out of hand.

Oof...

I've noted elsewhere that as engineers, it's our job to engage with difficult questions, and we have a real responsibility of getting those things right - so arguments are to be expected, and not feared. The real thing to be feared is when communications break down entirely and we stop being able to work together, but some amount of arguing is healthy because it brings attention to issues of genuine importance. Tone policing, on the other hand, is pure distraction.

My wish is that we can get past the superficial "are we talking nicely to each other?" phase and start having conversations on what genuine professionalism means, and for me that means keeping the focus on the work at hand.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 24, 2024 11:30 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> My wish is that we can get past the superficial "are we talking nicely to each other?" phase and start having conversations on what genuine professionalism means, and for me that means keeping the focus on the work at hand.

Just a small counter to that ... and I know people sometimes think I'm guilty of far too much chit-chat :-) we need channels that are NOT work-related, where we can get to know each other as people. imho too many people think "professionalism" means "just work" - I've seen far too many online fora destroyed by a few people objecting to stuff that "is off topic". If we don't socialise, things fall apart.

Cheers,
Wol

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 24, 2024 12:54 UTC (Tue) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link]

That's great when it happens, but let's try not to become a "good old boy's club" where the people who have time to show up at conferencies and be chummy get their work in and everyone else gets shut out.

Because that is becoming an issue as well; not everyone is able to show up at conferences or wants to invest the time.

We just need to make sure the work comes first.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 24, 2024 23:28 UTC (Tue) by salewski (subscriber, #121521) [Link] (3 responses)

> Not sure if moderation itself would have solved anything here. I'm not saying it's not important: if you want a well behaved community, you need some sort of thought police, i.e. moderation.

We do not need thought police. Moderation can come from within, but even well-meaning individuals will be misunderstood from time to time, or unintentionally give offense. And even under the best of circumstances some individuals will take offense where none was intended or detected by all other readers/listeners. And then there are trolls, which are a fact of life. And all of that is okay, if sometimes unpleasant.

Many (most?) Usenet clients have the notion of a "kill file", which allows users to mute noise from unwanted people, uninteresting topics, known trolls, and other criteria. I don't know how to make a similar thing work across the entire Web, but I would prefer such a capability to having controversial moderation -- each user would then decide the suitability for their tastes of content in various channels.

And I do not mean to suggest that some external moderation cannot be useful, but in an ideal world it would be something that folks opt into, and still have access to the moderated content to decide for themselves.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 25, 2024 10:30 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

> We do not need thought police

In some ways, Moderation is the exact opposite of Thought Police.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 28, 2024 20:13 UTC (Sat) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

It's weird how people think Moderation is "Thought police" when it's quite clearly "Behaviour police".

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 28, 2024 1:43 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

> Many (most?) Usenet clients have the notion of a "kill file", which allows users to mute noise from unwanted people, uninteresting topics, known trolls, and other criteria.

Which has its own problems. If you're working on a project, there are people you can't reasonably just killfile; if you ignore the wrong person trying to merge a patch into your subsystem, that may cause as much fuss as moderation. Even if your killfile makes it comfortable for you, newcomers to the project will not see the forum (mailing list, etc.) the way you do, and may leave or behave in a way they see as acceptable for the forum, as judged by the killfiled members?

> each user would then decide the suitability for their tastes of content in various channels.

They do. Many platforms have switches for adult content, and some of them get more fine-grained. But it's usually set to be non-offensive by default, so you don't have to figure out what needs to be set to keep things to a default safe. The amount of work to personally build a killfile in a forum, and the limits of that killfile even after wading through the unpleasantness that justified its creation, means that forums are likely to split rather than everyone dealing with individual killfiles.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 25, 2024 11:32 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

I used to think like you but working with americans/north europeans made me realise that it's a losing strategy.

The best way to handle a conflict is to complain first. If you try to be reasonable or patient, eventually you will lose your patience and the other side WILL go and complain.

So it's best to have your side of the story be heard first.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 25, 2024 11:30 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (10 responses)

> In prior stories, I have lamented the tendency of FOSS and other internet communities to be actively hostile to moderation of any kind, especially when a more established person comes under scrutiny. I continue to hold that belief, but I feel in this case that the SC's handling of the situation, at least from an outsider's perspective, looks quite poor.

I encourage you to join the python discuss website and try first hand how their "moderation" works.

I'm currently banned because I said I can't just never upgrade my servers (since python breaks compatibility every release) because I want CVEs fixes for openssl.

It's a terrible community.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 7, 2025 16:21 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

This comment is noteworthy because before, in the initial LWN story on the Tim Peters case, from September, you (LtWorf) mentioned you were intending to comment on the PSF forums about this breakage issue and that you expected to just be ignored. Instead, it appears you were banned.

There seems to be something seriously wrong with community relations there.

Your previous comment: https://lwn.net/Articles/989940/

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 9, 2025 9:01 UTC (Thu) by pitrou (guest, #118306) [Link] (8 responses)

> I'm currently banned because I said I can't just never upgrade my servers (since python breaks compatibility every release) because I want CVEs fixes for openssl.

I'm not a moderator on discuss.python.org, but you certainly were not moderated just because of saying that.
Here what seems to be the relevant discussion: https://discuss.python.org/t/updating-pep-387-to-prefer-5...

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 9, 2025 13:42 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (7 responses)

Unfortunately some relevant text is "flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden."

Linking to that is not very helpful; in fact that discussion serves as further proof for *either* the rudeness of Mr. Peters *or* the inept heavy-handedness of the moderators, depending on what you believed before.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 9, 2025 15:43 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

In this case, it's about LtWorf - LWN commenter who said they had tried to raise issue of frequent breakage, and was banned. Having previously (in September, on the first story about Peters' ban) said they had this issue to raise and expected the heavy-handed moderators to ignore him (perhaps he meant have post just removed), but it seems he got a ban too (?).

And agreed, when the text is just completely expunged - making it impossible for observers to judge the facts for themselves - it just ends up re-inforcing prior positions.

There should be a way to access the removed text, via a button or some-such. In such a case moderation still works to keep the default view within lines, while allowing the community the required transparency into the process to see for themselves that any moderation is proper and so maintain trust.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 19, 2025 4:48 UTC (Sun) by riking (subscriber, #95706) [Link]

The button to view the hidden text becomes available once you've logged in to the site.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 9, 2025 16:44 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> Linking to that is not very helpful; in fact that discussion serves as further proof for *either* the rudeness of Mr. Peters *or* the inept heavy-handedness of the moderators, depending on what you believed before.

Confirmation bias.

Unless you are coming to it fresh, with no prejudices either way, it can be very difficult to step back and get a clear view ... IRREGARDLESS of the evidence.

Cheers,
Wol

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 10, 2025 6:33 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

"Irregardless" is not a word :-P but otherwise, yeah.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 10, 2025 6:51 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, a prescriptivist I see :) . However, it seems to be a North America-originating case, so seeing Wol use it presents an interesting data point on its spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 10, 2025 9:42 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, wikipedia says it's been around 200 years and more, so it's had plenty of time to travel :-)

Interesting article on "ain't", too.

I'm all for STANDARD English, so we can underSTAND each other, but no I'm definitely not a prescriptivist. Don't pre- (or pro-) scribe my language, and I won't pre/oscribe yours. Just make sure that (in my hearing) it's what I consider polite and understandable :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Jan 10, 2025 10:25 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

On discourse posts are flagged by the community, not moderators. AIUI after three flags a post is automatically hidden without moderator involvement. The only moderator involvement you can conclude from that link is that they didn't reverse it when it hit the moderator queue.

The moderators and the author can still see the content so there are enough ways it could be posted elsewhere if necessary.

Moderation is a thankless job. People love to complain about moderators, but rarely step up to do the job themselves.

If there's a ban in place it's not visible in the interface.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 28, 2024 2:23 UTC (Sat) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (2 responses)

There are a couple of issues with this.

Firstly, there's the issue you identified: the ratio between effort to moderate and effort to spam/flame. If it requires all of this effort to ban someone that's _clearly_ acting in bad faith, then you create the perfect opportunity to troll. Trolling is the art of the output amplification attack: the ideal troll puts in a small amount of effort and induces others to put in large amounts of effort to combat him. Obviously if you allow this process to be short-circuited then you just go back to the original problem if that short-circuit process is abused.

Secondly, there's just the issue of the stakes. Ultimately it's a discussion forum for a programming language on the internet, and one of many. In the real world we have more rigorous decision-making processes before we convict people and sentence them for crimes, because the stakes are much higher! You can be tarnished with a conviction, fined, and even sent to prison. The required standard of proof in order to remove someone from an internet mailing list is surely lower.

Thirdly, the problem is quite different from the problems that arise in real life. It isn't usually about whether there is adequate proof of what is claimed to have happened, but whether what has happened actually contravenes community standards. What has actually been said is clear on the record: it's all right there in the mailing list/forum archives. But whether the conduct falls outside what is acceptable in the "community" (for lack of a better word) is really the question. And so it doesn't really matter what the rules say, because the rules don't usually correspond perfectly with what the community standards actually are.

If the rules are vague, that gives a lot of power to whomever interprets them. But on the other hand, if the rules are very specific, it gives more leeway to trolls that purposefully edge right up to the boundary of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour but don't cross it. If you make a list of unacceptable words, they'll find one you don't list and use that, then cry foul when you try to ban them. "It isn't on the list". But if you don't, then you allow moderators to claim that "chairman" or "master" are offensive.

There are reasons why all your rules are unacceptable in certain scenarios. For example, spam-detection can be an arms race where you lose if you tell spammers exactly why they're being banned. Security by obscurity is sadly the name of that game. Generally though, I agree that you should have to give reasons when someone is banned. However, sometimes people are banned because they're dickheads and that's all you need to say. This depends on the scale and stakes of the "community" though. Given that this is the official Python discussion forum we're talking about, it probably should lean towards more formalism than it has and more transparent decision-making. But it would be unreasonable to expect Jon Corbet to follow formal processes like these when banning people for obnoxious comments on this website. It's a private comment section on the website of a business.

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 28, 2024 22:50 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Thirdly, the problem is quite different from the problems that arise in real life. It isn't usually about whether there is adequate proof of what is claimed to have happened, but whether what has happened actually contravenes community standards. What has actually been said is clear on the record: it's all right there in the mailing list/forum archives. But whether the conduct falls outside what is acceptable in the "community" (for lack of a better word) is really the question. And so it doesn't really matter what the rules say, because the rules don't usually correspond perfectly with what the community standards actually are.

To my mind there are two simple rules that could be applied fairly objectively. PJ's rule was very simple - "If I wouldn't have it in my living room, I won't have it on my website". Okay, that really needs some sort of BDFL, but it's simple and clear. And when muckrakers came to me and said "your posts have been deleted, we're getting an outrage group together", my reaction was pretty simple - "clear off and stop wasting my time, the odd deleted post is a price well worth paying for a respectful website with high-quality discourse".

The other one, which also really requires a BDFL, is that "we don't care whether it was respectful, offensive or whatever. If it damages the community expect your knuckles to be rapped. HARD." As a gentoo user, I gather there were a couple of devs who should have been chucked out much faster than they were, because they did a lot of damage. I don't know anything about it, but I gather the distro went through rather a dark patch a few years ago, due to just those one or two people. (And damage is often reasonably easy to identify. The problem is, something that actually does a lot of damage, can be seen as something good ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Moderation is important; it deserves to be done better than this

Posted Dec 29, 2024 19:12 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

I never claimed this would be easy. Good moderation is a very hard problem. But when you're running the main discussion forum for the most popular[1] programming language in the world, you do have a duty of care to your community. At least in my view, anyway.

[1]: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

The horse's mouth

Posted Jan 7, 2025 14:16 UTC (Tue) by tim.one (guest, #175333) [Link]

I'm "the guy", the serial CoC terrorist in question. The quality of reporting, and of comments, on LWN are the best anywhere I've seen, and I appreciate that.

A curiosity is that fans of the ban _everywhere_ studiously avoid addressing the claimed violations. That's the last thing they'll ever talk about.

I've already written extensively about that on my blog, and at least two other bloggers did their best too at guessing what they _might_ be talking about. Nobody finds significant merit in any of those claims. For example, I was charged with defending claims of reverse sexism. The problem? I never mentioned it. Not once. Nobody can remember it because it never happened. So there's an excellent reason for why "they" didn't link to an example.

Relatedly, I was charged with defending reverse racism. In some ways that whopper is worse. I did mention that briefly, but in a message that very plainly _rejected_ the doctrine. The opposite of defending it. Nothing subtle about it. It's a failure to grasp the plain meaning of plain English. That's a charitable interpretation. It doesn't matter one whit who may have claimed offense when the thing being claimed isn't real. Nobody is asking for any details about the accusers. We're asking how even plainly false charges managed to survive review by "trained professionals" (if a paid 4-hour Zoom course on CoC enforcement counts as adequate training - I would have guessed that professionals in conflict resolution may require as much as 8 hours of training in social psychology ;-)).

I'm not going to engage with people who haven't at least read my blog, because they're disadvantaged by a severe lack of facts. It's not "the usual" CoC case, and cannot be understood by appealing to generalities. It's specifics here that are damning. Most commenters miss facts from the very start: it took 6 days for Ethan Furman to post the first reply, very bluntly and strongly saying "this is nonsense!". Gregory Smith replied with a straw man evasion, "refuting" a line of argument _nobody_ was actually making, Ethan least of all.

What "outsiders" are missing is that Ethan wasn't a friend of mine. Ethan is himself a moderator in some PSF spaces, and has handed out his own bans when warranted. It's in his _moderator's_ judgment that those specific claims are baseless, For those who identify with "authority", cognitive dissonance should have kicked in then already. Ethan was just about everyone's idea of a "reasonable person", with no dog in this fight apart from that his own senses of ethics and fairness were grossly offended. He's long on courage too, and from the wording of his brief dissent was clearly expecting they might ban him too for daring to speak his truth to power.

It's no mystery why ban targets who feel unfairly treated never return: agreeing to the charges is usually a prerequisite for being allowed back, and they refuse. In this case, I wasn't asked to agree to _any_ specific charge. In fact, the SC never even mentioned the charges to me. All of which has been explained on my blog for a long time already, and almost none of which has been disputed (Jake reported that he hadn't seen any dispute, and I can confirm that neither have I, neither in public nor in private). I agreed to everything they asked of me within a day. Which did not include that I had actually violated the CoC in any way.

While some in the PSF obviously want me gone, my reputation for integrity is unsullied across over 3 decades in the community. Most don't actually like me for technical prowess, but because I was one of the most consistently entertaining, informative, helpful, engaged, open, and welcoming of all Python's "big names". Those days are over, but you cannot sell that list of "violations" to people who've seen me, thousands of times, over decades, acting nothing like those shrill defamations claim of me. Not all that long ago, the PSF was showering me with awards for my unique posting style:

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-happy-medium-dis... (*)

Note especially the quotes from Thomas Wouters, who, ironically enough, was made a sacrificial lamb to be the public face of posting my ban announcement. I feel bad for him.

While I've since adopted a tedious posting style to avoid triggering newer people, I haven't really changed. I'm not a grim person, and still find humor (sometimes dark) in almost everything. I just keep all sense of joy bottled up now. "Joy is not professional, supportive, welcoming, or inclusive - unless it's joy at the humiliation of perceived enemies of our new Mandatory Utopia" ;-)

BTW. the claims came from the CoC WG, and were merely echoed by the SC. They say the SC and CoC WG are wholly independent, and don't share evidence or deliberations. Whether the SC itself believes those charges is something you'd have to ask them. They won't answer, and I'm sure I know part of why, but won't speculate without proof. Beyond noting again that I wasn't asked to plead guilt. Find your own way to make sense of that without challenging your preconceived certainty about who's kidding who here.

Ah. About legalities, I don't know or care. I'm a "Golden Rule" person. You willfully violate that, and you're guilty, no matter what laws say.

I would like an apology from the PSF, but don't expect one, and don't insist on one. What I demand is that they improve the broken _processes_ that led to this. My case wasn't the first one of trumped-up fantasy charges, and won't be the last. As an old, long-retired person for whom the PSF's statements make no difference at all in my real life, they could never damage me in any real way. It has been a great excuse to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. But other people aren't so fortunate, and I've always spoken up against the injustices I see. If they won't change even now, I'll put the PSF behind me on my own.

(*) There are reasons that article is from 2018. Some day I hope to write an essay about them. More than one thing happened that year that, IMO, sent the PSF down a bad path. As the PSF's Institutional Memory (I was a founder, worked hard to create it, and wan on its Board for its first 13 years), I dare say I'm worth reading on that topic. But too involved to do here now.

Good example

Posted Dec 23, 2024 23:48 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (2 responses)

I hope this sets a good example for others, in particular for the bcachefs maintainer. I miss kernel changelogs full of bcachefs changes.

Good example

Posted Dec 24, 2024 11:35 UTC (Tue) by evad (guest, #60553) [Link] (1 responses)

These are two entirely different situations, though. In the case of bcachefs, there was a clear, obvious and inarguable violation of the rules, in public, and those in charge were able to point at it and say "this is the issue!", and they had genuine back-forth discussions with him. In the case of Peters, as outlined in the article, we still don't know what he did wrong and what parts of what messages were violations of policies.

Good example

Posted Dec 24, 2024 14:46 UTC (Tue) by koverstreet (subscriber, #4296) [Link]

> and those in charge were able to point at it and say "this is the issue!", and they had genuine back-forth discussions with him

No, that part never happened.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 0:26 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (5 responses)

> The only winning move was not to reply.

And, this, right here, is the most damning indication that we're dealing with a disingenuous counterparty.

They're looking for the "winning move". They're not looking for a discussion, cooperation, clarity, or justice. They're simply trying to figure out how to win. Any discussion that does not result in them winning is therefore, in their point of view, pointless.

This is not taking a quote out of context: *No matter what* - you simply do not talk about "winning" or "losing" when trying to engage in a constructive discussion meant to illuminate reality from different points of view and find a common ground. All it does is highlight that you're not interested in an honest discussion - you're interested in a competition of power, where one loses or wins.

Unfortunately, it seems even volunteer positions of leadership inevitably attract the power hungry and corruptible. In my experience, volunteer organizations almost seem worse at attracting these sorts of folks - since the only rewards are:

(1) knowing you improved the community
or
(2) power over others

Hopefully, without the abstentions, the SC has a good balance of both motivations. If not, get out the popcorn, and learn Rust.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 1:13 UTC (Tue) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (1 responses)

It almost certainly is a WarGames (1983) reference. It is in regards to Global Thermonuclear War eventually leading to tic-tac-toe. WOPR became a conscientious AI. I'm fairly certain he places this argument into the mutually assured destruction category and decided not to play. I strongly recommend the movie. Some aspects are dated, but many are not.

I've had arguments with Tim Peters in the (20-ish-year) distant past. We're both head-strong and state our views strongly and sometimes quite obscurely. I respect him. If there is no real evidence available, there's no way for anyone to decide except on gut feelings.

Yikes. That movie came out 41 years ago. It was moderately formative for me. That gives you an estimation of my age.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 1:15 UTC (Tue) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

And the egg (nog) is on my face. My fault for not reading the convoluted they-said-they-said aspects thoroughly enough. I'm sorry.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 7:03 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

Unrelated to CoC clusterfuck, just something really depressing in your posting:

|the only rewards are:
|
|(1) knowing you improved the community
|or
|(2) power over others

Interesting. So it's all about social standing for you? No such thing as "figured out how to do something new and actually got it done" or "found a neat way to guarantee such-and-such properties" or "chased down a hole in something and figured out how to fix it", etc.? Not even considered as possibly rewarding?

I wonder how widespread your worldview really is; you have my sincere condolences.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 7:50 UTC (Tue) by stoneleaf (guest, #151310) [Link]

Those either fall into the "improved the community" category, or don't require a leadership position.

And, oop.

Posted Dec 24, 2024 10:20 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Precisely, the whole point of open-source is that
"figure out how to do something new and actually got it done" or "find a neat way to guarantee such-and-such properties" or "chase down a hole in something and figured out how to fix it"
do not require a position of authority.

The people actively looking for position of authority often have other goals.

No public proofs then?

Posted Dec 24, 2024 8:21 UTC (Tue) by gmgod (guest, #143864) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm not sure I fully grasped the situation so if my assumptions are wrong, please correct me...

So at no time was there a public "trial". A couple people privately complained. Those stayed anonymous. Discussion was limited to a single (non)interraction without any meaningful info about who complained about what exactly...

It's not just a matter of the process laid out in the CoC, which is worded subjectively anyway... It's a matter of process used in legal systems of most countries, after centuries of evolution: offendees cannot stay anonymous and their claims must be made public.

If there was a misunderstanding, it's better cleared instead of being maintained by well-meaning morons who think offendees need to be "shielded" from it, don't you think so?

All this could have probably been solved in 2 hours, just by putting Tim and various (2?) offendees in the same (virtual) room with a couple SC people acting as mediator. God that's what is usually done from schools to workplaces.

No public proofs then?

Posted Dec 24, 2024 9:51 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (3 responses)

While I agree a lot could be learned from how court systems around the world deal with these kinds of things, anonymous witnesses, closed hearings and redacted judgements are a thing in the real world too.

This usually happens in cases where it pertains to personal matters and/or there is a significant power imbalance between the complainant and the (supposed) offender. And that sounds like exactly the kind of thing we're dealing with here. It comes down to the question if justice can be served in situations where the victims don't dare come forward because they expect a public backlash. It's basically the whole #metoo dynamic.

Here it's even more complicated because the nature of FOSS communication online means that anonimised witness statements are effectively impossible. To reveal the evidence (even redacted) is to deanonimise.

I agree that getting people into the same (virtual) room is often more effective, the (perceived) risk of public backlash against the (supposed) victims is a problem because of lack of any meaningful enforcement mechanism for any sanction whatsoever.

Not sure there are any good answers here. Giving the (supposed) offender a chance of rebuttal seems a quick win though.

No public proofs then?

Posted Dec 24, 2024 10:43 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Not sure there are any good answers here.

I know I've said it before, but "Seek to not give offence, be slow to take offence".

Okay, it takes judgement by the enforcer as to who's breaking which rule, but the reality is a lot of people - especially in tech - are socially inept and a polite reminder of rule 1 never goes amiss (note I did *not* say "seek not to ..." - it's actually a bit stronger - actively try to avoid causing offence).

And then there's culture clashes - some things are offensive cross-culturally and are either innocent or unavoidable - that's where rule 2 comes in - don't stir the pot where no offence was intended.

And lastly, picking up on what someone else said, an enforcer could send a private message saying "this is getting OTT. Please explain *to*me*, in a *public*post*, what your position is. Kids get themselves in a position they can't see how to get out of. A moderator stepping in and saying "Explain yourself" could be just what they need to clear the red mist ... (without needing to lose face!)

Only problem is, it needs moderators who are prepared to be pro-active and step in early as soon as things *start* getting out of hand.

Cheers,
Wol

No public proofs then?

Posted Dec 24, 2024 14:05 UTC (Tue) by acarno (subscriber, #123476) [Link]

> Seek to not give offence, be slow to take offence

Unless I'm mistaken, this is Postel's law applied to interpersonal communication, no? ;-)

No public proofs then?

Posted Dec 24, 2024 18:57 UTC (Tue) by gmgod (guest, #143864) [Link]

You and me usually see things very differently but I wholeheartedly agree with your rules. They would make better CoCs than absolutely everything I've read. It boils down to being a decent human being but it's a bit more explicit than that.

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Dec 25, 2024 11:41 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (5 responses)

I've had the displeasure of interacting with the python community on different occasions.

When I pointed out that PEP 563 was going to break my library (typedload), Guido's reply just included a workaround (that didn't work) and the matter was closed there.

When, later on, the authors of pydantic raised the same issue (the change breaks all runtime typecheckers), the change was stopped, since it was going to make fastapi broken.

This tells us that there's a silent threshold of how many downloads per day from pypi under which breaking your project is 100% acceptable.

I am currently banned from the python's discuss because I complained about the constant flow of breaking changes that require constant changes to change nothing.

A user advised me to just stop doing updates.

I replied that it was not an acceptable solution since it's how systems get compromised and my replies started to get removed, while people could still give this kind of counterproductive "advice" to me.

I wrote to complain about the moderation that was letting people reply to me but preventing me from pointing out how the advice didn't work.

That got me a silent ban. I got banned without even an email. I only noticed because I opened the website (which I don't open often at all).

I think at this moment the only people who have an interest in taking part are doing so because they are paid by someone to do so. There is no "community" in the regular sense of the word, it's just business interactions between consultants.

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Dec 28, 2024 0:07 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (4 responses)

> This tells us that there's a silent threshold of how many downloads per day from pypi under which breaking your project is 100% acceptable.

Or rather that there's some metric of how many projects and how important the projects are versus how valuable and important the breaks are. I don't understand what you expect otherwise. As https://xkcd.com/1172/ points out, any change breaks something. (e.g. Any function added to a global namespace, or a local namespace that can be imported, can conflict with existing code.) Unless you freeze the code, like TeX, you have to deal with that. You worry more about breaking important things and worry less about breaking marginal things.

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Dec 29, 2024 20:12 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

In this particular case, the Python community has already acknowledged its mistake in PEP 649[1], and made plans to fix it (in that same PEP and PEP 749), so I'm not sure there's much to accomplish by continuing to discuss it at this point.

[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0649/#mistaken-rejection-of-t...

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Dec 29, 2024 22:34 UTC (Sun) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

I think it's important to potential authors of python libraries to be aware that if your users are aware of caching and do not re-download the same file thousands of times every day, your bugreports about breaking changes will be ignored.

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Dec 29, 2024 22:51 UTC (Sun) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

As demonstrated by the fact that PEP 649, it was actually possible to not break compatibility!

I expect not breaking compatibility for the lolz to be the default course of actions, even if there would be only tens of projects that get broken instead of hundreds of thousands.

I discourage everyone from interacting with the python community

Posted Jan 10, 2025 17:53 UTC (Fri) by Vorpal (guest, #136011) [Link]

This is how the Rust project is handling it (or at least striving to handle it): doing test builds on all published open source Rust software using a system called "crater".

Sometimes they do accept breakage (you need to be able to fix security and safety issues after all). Often they submit bug reports and even patches to affected projects (if the project is still alive, not much point if it is unmaintained).

And of course, sometimes it still goes wrong (see the issue with the "time" crate early last year). But at least they are trying.

It doesn't feel like Python is making an effort to avoid breakage. They have nothing like Rust's crater (they absolutely could have it, based on packages on PyPI).

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 25, 2024 17:05 UTC (Wed) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (27 responses)

> Silence because it was very clear that many people in the space were not up for a discussion. They had already made up their minds and were just looking for a fight. Repeating many of the same problems that led to the situation in the first place.

> The only winning move was not to reply.

I've been on the side of the SC. A bunch of people show up claiming they won't believe you unless you give intimate details about the victims. The problem is that you know how communities treat the victims, and, honestly, how the people claiming they'll believe the victims *actually* behave. It's lose lose. The only way to mitigate harm is to keep the victim info private and generally hope that the most of the people who leave over it are the ones you couldn't trust anyway.

> They appear nearly wholly without merit to me, are widely (in & out of PSF members) disbelieved by many,

I'm interested to see what Peters thinks of this statement in six months time. He's already acknowledged that he was dismissive of what was explained to him and that it didn't seem reasonable *to him*. He also conflates a bunch of people disbelieving the claims as if that's evidence of some sort. I'm glad to see that he returned with the understanding that he needed to behave differently on these forums, but him holding onto his denial of the events that led him there may undermine really grokking the lesson.

> what the community itself should learn from this incident

I would really love to see the community really consider Hammond's words and take an introspective path. The loudest of the community have made it very clear that they believe that eminence should be the primary consideration when evaluating a forum member's behavior and they should consider why the Steering Committee has little choice but to ignore them when charged with enforcing standards that are explicitly trying to fix this misbehavior of open-source communities.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 25, 2024 19:43 UTC (Wed) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link]

There’s only one ‘victim’ here and his name is Tim Peters.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 26, 2024 14:31 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

His only violation was to complain about the powergrab of the SC.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 27, 2024 21:42 UTC (Fri) by JamesErik (guest, #17417) [Link] (23 responses)

Disclaimer: I have read every thread I can get my hands on regarding both Tim's suspension and his return.

> [Tim has] already acknowledged that he was dismissive of what was explained to him and that it didn't seem reasonable *to him*.

Sorta. He said he applied the "reasonable person" test, which is an exercise explicitly designed to try to shed one's bias and look at a matter as objectively as possible. He notes the CoC council member's single (!) interaction with him was too vague for him to understand the root of the concern, much less respond appropriately to it.

> him holding onto his denial of the events that led him there may undermine really grokking the lesson.

Denial? That's balderdash. His shedding light on the appalling (my word, not his) approach by the CoC council is in no way denying his actions. And what lesson? Stop seeking clarity on others' positions when you feel they haven't addressed perceived gaps? Stop being light-hearted?

> The loudest of the community have made it very clear that they believe that eminence should be the primary consideration when evaluating a forum member's behavior

What a contemptible interpretation. I hope that's merely from not following along closely. Yes, Tim is rightly an eminent voice in the community, but the loud outcry was rooted in the unambiguously opaque, seemingly capricious, and arguably bad-faith actions of the CoC council (Making light of sexual harassment??? What a grotesque mischaracterization!!!). In some sense it's fortunate that this happened to such a prominent community member so that CoC council dysfunction can be corrected and so that others with less prominence might not have to suffer its whims.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 28, 2024 2:02 UTC (Sat) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (22 responses)

>> [Tim has] already acknowledged that he was dismissive of what was explained to him and that it didn't seem reasonable *to him*.

> Sorta. He said he applied the "reasonable person" test, which is an exercise explicitly designed to try to shed one's bias and look at a matter as objectively as possible. He notes the CoC council member's single (!) interaction with him was too vague for him to understand the root of the concern, much less respond appropriately to it.

Let's say you come to me to express a negative opinion about something that I've done and that you'd like me stop doing that thing. I don't really want to stop doing that thing. I don't really understand why you even think that thing I did is bad. After consulting with only myself with complete certainty that I've shed my own biases despite having no other inputs I decided that your entire opinion that I don't understand is unreasonable. Unreasonable here meaning no reasonable person would hold that opinion.

Do you think "dismissive" is an inappropriate word here to describe how I behaved? It seems to me like I was *very* dismissive of your opinion. I didn't even seek to understand it before concluding it didn't pass my "reasonable person" test. If you and I had an interaction like this, how many times do you think you would repeat yourself trying to convince me that what I was doing was wrong? Is that number the same number of times you expect of the Steering Committee? If they don't match up what accounts for the difference?

>> him holding onto his denial of the events that led him there may undermine really grokking the lesson.

> Denial? That's balderdash. His shedding light on the appalling (my word, not his) approach by the CoC council is in no way denying his actions.

In the article he refers to the things the SC said as, "shrill, demonizing defamations" and says that he "does not "apologize for claimed violations I also find baseless"." Perhaps I am misinterpreting his words here, but I read that as denying at least some of the accusations that the SC made.

> And what lesson? Stop seeking clarity on others' positions when you feel they haven't addressed perceived gaps? Stop being light-hearted?

It is interesting that you say "Stop being light-hearted" here because the main lesson that he does seem to have learned is to change his posting style. He acknowledges that he was oblivious to how his style was being understood differently by others. This is the lesson that he was intended to learn. I only wonder if he has not fully considered all of the ways in which he may be saying things that he *thinks* are harmless because he still denies the full breadth of what the SC claimed he did.

> In some sense it's fortunate that this happened to such a prominent community member so that CoC council dysfunction can be corrected and so that others with less prominence might not have to suffer its whims.

I don't agree with your conclusion here, but I do think it's fortunate that this happened to Tim Peters. He's made the extremely unlikely decision to return after his ban. Few people, especially those that claim they've been defamed by the moderators, ever return to a forum after a ban. I am interested to see if any of the results of that will result in anything *other* than a chilling effect where core developers that misbehave are less likely to be punished.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 28, 2024 19:07 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

> Let's say you come to me to express a negative opinion about something that I've done and that you'd like me stop doing that thing.

Well AFAICT the issue here isn't, per se, that the People In Command wanted Tim P. to stop doing something.

The issue at hand is that they didn't actually tell him which exact thing they have a negative opinion about, didn't actually tell the community which action resulted in a multiple-month ban. Furthermore, they refuse to engage in a discussion about why that kind of attitude could possibly be seen as somewhat misguided an contra-productive.

> he still denies the full breadth of what the SC claimed he did

Has the SC actually *told* him, by now, what they claim he did wrong? Generic claims of abrasive language et al. are not sufficient.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 28, 2024 20:12 UTC (Sat) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (1 responses)

>> Let's say you come to me to express a negative opinion about something that I've done and that you'd like me stop doing that thing.

> Well AFAICT the issue here isn't, per se, that the People In Command wanted Tim P. to stop doing something.

You seem to be responding to a different point than what we were discussing. You argued with my characterization of Tim Peters behavior that was the following:

>> [Tim has] already acknowledged that he was dismissive of what was explained to him and that it didn't seem reasonable *to him*.

This was about the very specific moment where a member of the SC tried to talk to him about was behavior that continuing to do it got him banned. I'll restate my response to you differently so it may be easier for you to answer:

Why do you feel like he wasn't dismissive of the concerns that were brought to him in person? Said differently, do you believe that, despite Tim Peters admitting that he didn't really understand the complaint, and that he has since acknowledged that he was ignorant to how certain people were reading his posts, that he gave a fully considered response to the person that complained to him at the time?

Do you not agree that if you decide that somebody's complaint doesn't pass the "reasonable person" test, that you are calling the complaint, and the complainant, unreasonable?

>> he still denies the full breadth of what the SC claimed he did

> Has the SC actually *told* him, by now, what they claim he did wrong? Generic claims of abrasive language et al. are not sufficient.

I think you have this backwards. The SC most definitely told him. You take issue with the way in which he was informed. They tried to correct him privately and Tim Peters dismissed the complaint. The SC then, quite publicly, told him exactly what they think he did.

Tim Peters *denies* some of the claims. The claims themselves though, however unsupported you may find them, or however unbelievable you may find them, were certainly told to him and enumerated quite publicly. He responded to the post where the SC told him, so its that Tim Peters knows exactly what he's being accused of as well.

This sort of reversal of the logic is happening all over the place in this discussion. You *disagreeing* with a point that was made, or the way that they made it, does not mean that the speaker didn't make that point.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Jan 10, 2025 13:41 UTC (Fri) by zahlman (guest, #175387) [Link]

> I think you have this backwards. The SC most definitely told him. You take issue with the way in which he was informed. They tried to correct him privately and Tim Peters dismissed the complaint. The SC then, quite publicly, told him exactly what they think he did.

>Tim Peters *denies* some of the claims. The claims themselves though, however unsupported you may find them, or however unbelievable you may find them, were certainly told to him and enumerated quite publicly. He responded to the post where the SC told him, so its that Tim Peters knows exactly what he's being accused of as well.

All of the above is entirely off-base.

The claims in the public enumeration come from the CoC WG, not the SC - they are merely *relayed by* the SC. The enumeration is completely *ex post facto*; Mr. Peters had no opportunity to act on the claims prior to being suspended. Peters was, per his account, never directly contacted by the CoC WG. Mr. Peters describes the one contact he got from the SC as vague and generally not actionable. In his own words (https://tim-one.github.io/psf/ban):

> Without specificity, the best I could make of it was “we’re not objecting to what you’re saying, we’re objecting to who you are - become someone different, in ways you must already know we have in mind”.

He identified only one specific claim in that message, finding it unreasonable (https://tim-one.github.io/psf/ban_qa#crimeSH). You've said a lot about dismissiveness ITT, as if that should be something inherently wrong; but I ask you to consider the post in question (https://discuss.python.org/t/for-your-consideration-propo...) and whether you can find anything objectionable in it. I cannot.

Ms. Morehouse characterized (https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a...) Mr. Peters' response to the SC email thus:

> we did discuss this directly with the person first as an initial corrective measure where the feedback was not received and no willingness to listen or improve was indicated (in fact, doubling down on issues we were trying to address occurred).

While I don't doubt this, it's hard to receive feedback that isn't understood, and people should be allowed to dispute feedback given to them - when someone says that you've done something wrong, *it's possible in principle for that person to be incorrect or unjustified*.

WRT denial, Mr. Peters *addresses* all of the claims at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/crimes . He finds "a tiny shred of merit" in one, but all in all he seems not very impressed with them (and he really shouldn't be impressed with them).

For the record, re one of the points made there: I did see Mr. Peters' "speculation about my mental state" after I was banned from the forum. It was not entirely correct, but it was quite reasonable and I certainly didn't take any offense to it.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 28, 2024 22:41 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (17 responses)

> It is interesting that you say "Stop being light-hearted" here because the main lesson that he does seem to have learned is to change his posting style. He acknowledges that he was oblivious to how his style was being understood differently by others. This is the lesson that he was intended to learn. I only wonder if he has not fully considered all of the ways in which he may be saying things that he *thinks* are harmless because he still denies the full breadth of what the SC claimed he did.

I get the impression - correct me if I'm wrong - is that the reason for THAT is that the SC has never claimed anything!

Note that Tim says he only had ONE contact with the SC. And if whoever made that ONE contact failed to express things in a way Tim could understand, then he CAN'T learn anything, because nobody cares enough to try and make sure he understood!

If somebody comes to me, complains, and walks off, then my reaction pretty much every time is to just ignore them. ESPECIALLY in a work context. If they can't be bothered to talk WITH me, rather than AT me, then they aren't worth listening to. EVER!

Whether that's the case or not, I have no idea, but Tim's side of the story seems to be "The SC were all mouth and no ears, I have no idea what they were trying to say, and they made no attempt to enlighten me". Learning implies teaching. Teaching implies the teacher trying to understand what the learner is thinking. What appears to have happened here is *PR*eaching, and preaching generally involves the preacher making no attempt whatever to make sure his message is getting across.

Cheers,
Wol

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 29, 2024 0:18 UTC (Sun) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (16 responses)

> I get the impression - correct me if I'm wrong - is that the reason for THAT is that the SC has never claimed anything!

It's my understanding that all of this started with SC making specific claims in the suspension message. It's my understanding that these are the claims where Tim Peters accepts some of them, but rejects others

https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a...

> If somebody comes to me, complains, and walks off, then my reaction pretty much every time is to just ignore them. ESPECIALLY in a work context. If they can't be bothered to talk WITH me, rather than AT me, then they aren't worth listening to. EVER!

This statement presumes something about the relationship that Tim Peters has with the person that talked to him which is why I maintain that there's a strong eminence to everyone's defense Tim Peters. Let's say your boss came to you and said something you didn't understand, but told you that if you did that again you were fired. Now this is probably not the best way for your boss to approach you, but are you just going to ignore them and wait to see if they fire you? or are *you* going to seek to understand what it is they want?

Does the fact that they failed to explain it well to you change whether or not it was a fireable offense?

Every portrayal of this situation seems to take the position that it's the job of the forum moderator to make sure that everybody who is breaking the rules completely understands them. That is not their job. Their job is to enforce the rules of a forum. Whether the person misbehaving understands why their behavior is unacceptable is *not* a requisite to ban people for breaking the rules.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 29, 2024 13:53 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (14 responses)

> Does the fact that they failed to explain it well to you change whether or not it was a fireable offense?

Actually, certainly under UK law, IT DOES.

> Whether the person misbehaving understands why their behavior is unacceptable is *not* a requisite to ban people for breaking the rules.

Whether the person allegedly misbehaving UNDERSTANDS WHAT THE COMPLAINT IS is most definitely a pre-requisite for taking ANY action (unless the person is "not of sound mind" and unable to understand the problem).

Okay, the rules have changed a lot over the years, and different countries may have different standards, but (and I suspect it goes back to Magna Carta) the accused has a right to have the charges clearly explained. And the impression I have most definitely been left with is that when Tim sought an explanation, he was left facing a brick wall. That's not Justice - that's a Kangaroo Court.

> or are *you* going to seek to understand what it is they want?

Actually, I've been in a situation very similar to this, and my boss's reaction was very similar to the SC - they *refused* to discuss the matter. And if it had come to the crunch my reaction would have been a formal complaint against my boss (don't forget I'm UK - we don't have "hire and fire"). How am I supposed to satisfy the boss, if I don't understand what he wants and he refuses to discuss the matter?

Cheers,
Wol

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 16:25 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (13 responses)

IMHO employment law is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Tim is not and has never been a PSF employee. The personal consequences of getting fired are dramatically worse than the personal consequences of getting banned from a discussion forum, so of course employees have far greater rights and protections than forum commenters.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 16:27 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (12 responses)

Correction: Tim was previously a PSF board member, so you could argue with "has never been a PSF employee." But a member of the board is not really the same thing as an employee. It's irrelevant either way.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 17:23 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (11 responses)

> Correction: Tim was previously a PSF board member, so you could argue with "has never been a PSF employee." But a member of the board is not really the same thing as an employee. It's irrelevant either way.

Except, as Peters has repeatedly pointed out, the PSF still *publicly* states that he was suspended for unspecified CoC violations. This sort of thing can have pretty serious reputational consequences that will adversely affect one's actual employment options.

It is not unreasonable to demand that they either substantiate those claims [1] or formally retract them.

...Live by the policy book, die by the policy book.

[1] eg by specifying exactly what and when, so you can even know what they're talking about, to say nothing of being able to actually defend yourself.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 17:48 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (10 responses)

> [1] eg by specifying exactly what and when, so you can even know what they're talking about, to say nothing of being able to actually defend yourself.

This is basically what appears to be pretty much the *entire* problem. By making public accusations, with apparently no substance to them, the SC is engaging in a pretty blatant case of slander. Which can carry serious consequences.

If Tim went to court (yes I know that's not a good idea) and said "I don't understand what I'm accused of", and the court agreed with him, the SC would be in deep doo-doo.

In civilised Western Society, it is considered a basic right that you are entitled to know what you are accused of.

Cheers,
Wol

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 18:41 UTC (Mon) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (8 responses)

> If Tim went to court (yes I know that's not a good idea) and said "I don't understand what I'm accused of", and the court agreed with him, the SC would be in deep doo-doo.

Perhaps this is a US court versus a UK court thing, but my experience with courts is that this isn't true. I've personally been both in court and in jail where I did not know all of the details of the specific crimes I was accused of. I assure you that my misunderstanding of those accusations had absolutely no bearing on whether the system considered me guilty of those crimes.

Now if the court agreed with the *facts* that Tim presented, I would expect you to be right. Unfortunately for Tim he's already agreed that his posting style needed to change in order to interact on this forum in a way the SC would like. I expect that would undermine his claims of slander or defamation in a formal setting.

> In civilised Western Society, it is considered a basic right that you are entitled to know what you are accused of.

To my understanding though Tim Peters was told what he stood accused of. He doesn't *agree* with those accusations.

I think this may have dragged us off course from what I meant by using these examples though, so I'll bring it back to that with a more local motivating example:

We've been going on in this thread for a while. I think we've generally had civil disagreement and it has been a good conversation. Maybe the LWN editors *don't* agree and they pop into this thread telling us to stop. If they tell me to stop commenting on this, and I continue to do this, whether or not I agree with why they told me to stop, I am the one that is out of line. They don't owe me a series of emails explaining it.

If the editors did send me an email pointing to a specific message and said, "We don't like this." If I don't agree with them, they have no obligation to go ten rounds with me in email until I understand every bit of what I did wrong. I would also expect that if I kept posting the same style of messages that the editors didn't like that eventually I'd get banned from commenting or that my account may be revoked. This is their forum and I was misbehaving in it. My understanding of their criteria would not be a requisite for this, even though I probably would also be mad if I was banned for a reason I didn't understand or agree with.

If it got so bad and I was so intransigent that they decided to make a big post about my banning I'm sure I would personally think this a bit rude and probably be a bit defensive. Maybe I reply to that post with an opening paragraph about how much you all love me around here and how I've been in many productive conversations. From my perspective that's a wildly disrespectful move on my part and I would expect the editors to see it that they way too.

To me this is the fundamental disconnect I seem to be having with you and others I'm discussing this topic with. To me it was plain that Tim Peters was out of line. He *acknowledged* that he did not fully consider the complaint that was made against him until after the banning. Him continuing to complain about specific claims that he hasn't accepted yet feels like a smokescreen that has worked wonders, despite the bits of this that Tim has personally admitted to.

It is also plain to me that the ways in which forums operate that the moderators are obligated to prune and maintain the forum in accordance with *their* understanding of it. Perhaps they were wrong about whether Tim Peters behavior did violate the CoC. Despite that though, if they *did* believe he violated it, that he was continuing to violate it, and that their attempts to curtail his behavior had failed up to that point it would have been negligent of them not to take the next steps in order to stop it.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 19:16 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

> It is also plain to me that the ways in which forums operate that the moderators are obligated to prune and maintain the forum in accordance with *their* understanding of it.

This isn't about a "forum" -- This is about the PSF suspending one of its "Core Members" from participating in _all official activities_ and from utilizing any official resources (including a forum and other communication channels), due to "CoC Violations".

If the target's entire professional career revolves around this sort of work, this is effectively a career-killing event, which opens up a massive pile of potential legal liability -- A point that Peters has also made.

This is why actual ProfessionalOrganizations [1] have exhaustively comprehensive disciplinary processes (closer than not to what you'd see in an actual court of law) least of which is "don't announce disciplinary actions until _after_ the accused is told how/what/were/when and given the opportunity to meaningfully respond in an open-to-interested-parties-to-attend manner."

[1] ie professions which have legal/certification barriers to entry; doctors, lawyers, home inspectors, plumbers, Professional/Certified Engineers, and many more.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 20:34 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (3 responses)

I suspect that you are entirely missing the point here, by trying to look at that from the point of view of a person being, er, disciplined _OR_ from the point of view of persons applying the discipline in question. There is the third role in that, and this is what gnu_lorien seems to identify with. That is to say, somebody for whom "I want to see your manager" is the comforter of choice and who feels seriously threatened by contemplating a situation where that tool might not be available. I think the current US slang for that is "Karen", but I'm not sure if that's the perfect match and in any case the social type in question is much older than this slang.

It's not about due process of any kind - it's about a (theoretical) power available to be wielded whenever something is not to their liking.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 20:46 UTC (Mon) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (2 responses)

> There is the third role in that, and this is what gnu_lorien seems to identify with.

This is an rude mischaracterization of what I'm talking about here, and I think you know it. If you're intent here is to defend Tim Peters, trolling and insults may not be the winning strategy you think it is. One of the first things Tim Peters was accused of was sowing FUD and emotional responses that derailed productive conversation. If he's inspired you to come here with this ad hominem attack then you're giving the SC further evidence against Peters.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 21:36 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not involved with the guy or python community (or python as a language, for that matter) in any form, and the only source of inspiration here is the tone of your postings here. Speaking of mischaracterizations, the posting I'm replying to is full of precisely that, albeit covered by a conditional. To dispel any possible confusion,

* I am not concerned with defending Tim Peters (or SC, for that matter)
* I am not interested in power plays of any kind whatsoever, in _any_ community, so "winning strategy" would be lacking an objective in the first place.
* I could not care less whether you consider my impression of your motivation insulting (and I strongly suspect that you could not care less whether I would be insulted by your characterization of my motives)
* I honestly wonder which reading of what I wrote might fit ad hominem - "you seem to be talking past each other" is hard to interpret as "their arguments are to be disregarded due to some bad qualities they presumably have".

And yes, you do come across as somebody whose primary concern is fear of Those Scary People (in this case, somebody who presumably might get away with something you disapprove of due to their reputation in their community) and fervent wish to see The Authority (SC, in this case) demonstrate that such fears are unfounded. It may or may not be a miscommunication, but your postings (here - I've no idea if I'd ever seen your postings on Linux maillists and I don't read any python-related lists or fora) really sound that way.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 22:33 UTC (Mon) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link]

> * I honestly wonder which reading of what I wrote might fit ad hominem - "you seem to be talking past each other" is hard to interpret as "their arguments are to be disregarded due to some bad qualities they presumably have".

You didn't say "you seem to be talking past each other." You said:

> There is the third role in that, and this is what gnu_lorien seems to identify with
> I think the current US slang for that is "Karen",

I find it very hard to believe that you didn't intend the use of this term as an insult. Your overall tone is combative enough that it's hard to give you the benefit of the doubt.

> I could not care less whether you consider my impression of your motivation insulting (and I strongly suspect that you could not care less whether I would be insulted by your characterization of my motives)

You have a pretty low subscriber number, so I presume you also have some eminence in these communities. I am regularly saddened and let down when I find skilled people that have no consideration whatsoever for how they talk to others. Part of why you don't see me post on Linux mailing lists is because of how acceptable it is to be a jerk, and then pretend like you don't understand you were being a jerk.

> And yes, you do come across as somebody whose primary concern is fear of Those Scary People (in this case, somebody who presumably might get away with something you disapprove of due to their reputation in their community) and fervent wish to see The Authority (SC, in this case) demonstrate that such fears are unfounded.

This description is confusing enough to me that I'm not really sure that's even what you claimed I believed originally. It seems like what you're saying is that I'm the type of person who prefers a forum with moderators. Yes, that is true. Without moderators the only way to really redress your grievances is to leave the forum entirely. The SC would rather be more inclusive and give participants options other than simply abandoning that part of the python community entirely when somebody is generating grievances. This isn't about some fear that somebody got away with something, it's about the very real participatory chilling effect that misbehaving core people have on a community.

I'm taking the position in support of the SC on some level because I've been in their shoes before many times when running social organizations. A lot of the defenses I've seen of Tim Peters just seem untenable and like they're written by somebody who has never really faced the challenges of organizational management like this. What I've been trying to do is present examples and arguments in hopes of helping people break out of, what seems to me, to be a mental lock-in that they don't believe Tim Peters could have done *anything* worthy of a suspension. Unfortunately all of our heroes may disappoint us in this regard.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 20:38 UTC (Mon) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link] (2 responses)

> If the target's entire professional career revolves around this sort of work, this is effectively a career-killing event

This is a tricky consideration to make. The history of decision making that goes like "We will not punish this person not because they're innocent, but because of how bad it would be for the person that is punished" is fraught with abuse. Hearing this defense is a huge red flag to me and a big part of why a lot of the defense of Tim Peters feels way more like it's eminence rather than evidence based. I think Gregory Smith of the SC responded to that very well though: "Having done a bunch of useful things in the past does not grant anyone freedom to behave however they want in the future."

> This is why actual ProfessionalOrganizations [1] have exhaustively comprehensive disciplinary processes (closer than not to what you'd see in an actual court of law) least of which is "don't announce disciplinary actions until _after_ the accused is told how/what/were/when and given the opportunity to meaningfully respond in an open-to-interested-parties-to-attend manner."

> [1] ie professions which have legal/certification barriers to entry; doctors, lawyers, home inspectors, plumbers, Professional/Certified Engineers, and many more.

Whatever other consequences there may be to other people seeing the accusations against Tim Peters and decided to extrapolate that into other punishments, all the SC did here was suspend him from utilizing private resources for three months. If there were such a thing as a Python license that Tim Peters had paid for and the SC was deciding to permanently enjoin him from coding in Python, then I *would* expect such a licensing body to have more stringent standards.

Although, it is my understanding that even many of those sorts of professional organizations would be allowed to do what the SC did here. You can temporarily suspend somebody's license while the board considers whether or not to take it away permanently. This is a way that a professional organization lets somebody know that they're serious.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 31, 2024 1:12 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> This is a tricky consideration to make. The history of decision making that goes like "We will not punish this person not because they're innocent, but because of how bad it would be for the person that is punished" is fraught with abuse.

...and "let's publicly slander and punish this person with no justification beyond 'because we said so'" isn't fraught with abuse?

When there is a wide disparity in the relative power of the parties, restraints are supposed to be placed on the party with more power to prevent the other from being steamrolled.

> Hearing this defense is a huge red flag to me

You've clearly never been on the receiving end of this attitude. For your sake, I hope you never are.

> Whatever other consequences there may be to other people seeing the accusations against Tim Peters and decided to extrapolate that into other punishments, all the SC did here was suspend him from utilizing private resources for three months

No, they also publicly accused him of violating _something_ in the PSF's Code of Conduct, which enumerates at least 28 different things that are cause for discipline, including several that are outright criminal in most jurisdictions. Additionally, they appear to have not followed their own documented enforcement procedures, notably the section titled "follow up with the reported person" which is supposed to contain "A description of the person's behavior in neutral language".

(I note that their enforcement process document doesn't actually require any sort of pre-judgement outreach to the reported person, Which... is a *huge* red flag.)

So, is it "better to punish a hundred innocent people than let one go unpunished" or "better to let a hundred guilty go unpunished than punish a single innocent person"?

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 31, 2024 10:08 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> The history of decision making that goes like "We will not punish this person not because they're innocent, but because of how bad it would be for the person that is punished" is fraught with abuse.

So is "we will punish this person whether or not they did anything materially wrong, because if we don't and it turns out they did do/commit something actionable after all, we'll look bad".

And so is "we will punish this person because somebody is (or just might be) uncomfortable with what they do / did and we're afraid of the huge stink said somebody threatens to raise / is raising / might possibly raise on Asocial Media, even though there is/was no rule against it / it happened between mostly-consenting participants / take-your-pick".

Yes, handling such cases is No Fun. For anybody. But that doesn't absolve you from being taken to task for doing it badly and, worse, not even seeing the problem. I mean, Mr. Peters apparently didn't see the problem either, so there's some parity there, but Peters has significantly less power over the SC than vice versa.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 19:06 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

It would not merely be "not a good idea," it would in fact be quite a bad idea. The PSF is an American non-profit, meaning that it is protected from foreign defamation claims by the SPEECH Act (28 USC 4102), and from domestic claims by a family of legal doctrines specific to American law, among them:

* Truth (plaintiff must prove the defendant's statement was factually false, not just mean or unfair).
* Substantial truth (plaintiff must prove that the "gist or sting" of the defendant's statement was false, not just the literal wording).
* Actual malice (plaintiff must prove that defendant knew the statement was false or was reckless as to its falsity, which is a higher standard than "ordinary" negligence).
* Opinion (defendant is not liable for statements that cannot be meaningfully proved true or false).
* Opinion based on disclosed facts (defendant is not liable if the statement was an interpretation of disclosed or commonly-known facts, unless it implies the existence of additional facts).
* Depending on where the suit is brought, state-level anti-SLAPP laws (a procedural mechanism for quickly throwing out cases that are otherwise deficient without going through costly discovery, and defendant may also be eligible for attorney's fees if successful).
* Depending on the organizational relationship between the SC and the PSF, possibly section 230 (but then you would just sue the SC instead, so let's ignore this for the sake of argument).

The problem here is that most of the SC's statement is either substantially true (i.e. they can point to specific messages sent by Tim that roughly match the description given in the statement, even if you think that description is biased or unfair) or opinion based on disclosed facts (i.e. when they claimed that Tim's messages were harmful, they did not say anything to suggest that they were relying on evidence other than the messages themselves in order to reach that conclusion, so it does not create the implication that Tim did anything other than sending messages that the SC didn't like). If they made any minor mistakes in the wording of the statement, it is probably defensible under the actual malice and/or substantial truth doctrines.

Here is a law professor explaining the opinion-based-on-disclosed-facts doctrine in greater depth (as applied to a different case): https://wapo.st/3PlLvFG

In short: If I accuse you of sending messages that I don't like, and you really did send those messages, you probably can't sue me for libel or slander, no matter how nasty and unfair my description of those messages is, unless it is factually false. If I accuse you of referencing an SNL skit, and you really did reference an SNL skit, then that is not factually false, and the court is not going to inquire into whether there was anything wrong with referencing said skit.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Jan 10, 2025 13:42 UTC (Fri) by zahlman (guest, #175387) [Link]

>It's my understanding that all of this started with SC making specific claims in the suspension message.

This is not correct. The claims in question come from the CoC WG, not the SC. The message from SC member Thomas Wouters is merely quoting those claims. There is no indication that any of those claims were in private messages from the SC to Tim Peters: Peters describes a solitary contact from the SC as not containing anything of the sort, and the SC has not disputed this characterization. Wouters claimed in that post (on behalf of the SC):

> While we’re following the CoC WG’s recommendation here, we should make clear that we also received direct, very specific communication about the problematic behaviour and its impact.

However, it is unclear whether the "very specific communication" in question was from a specific complainant, from the CoC WG, or from an outside third party. Nor is it clear what it means to have "received" such communication.

As far as I can tell, none of the interested parties claim that Peters was advised of the bulk of this list prior to the suspension. So, yes, "all of this" did "start with" that announcement, because of the perceived unfairness.

> It's my understanding that these are the claims where Tim Peters accepts some of them, but rejects others

He does not, by my reading, "accept" any of them, except to find a small amount of merit in one - a plausible way in which things could be seen that way by others. And he has resolved to change his posting style (although I can't discern the difference) to stay on the safe side in that regard.

I think he is far too charitable there, honestly.

> Every portrayal of this situation seems to take the position that it's the job of the forum moderator to make sure that everybody who is breaking the rules completely understands them. That is not their job.

The steering committee is completely independent of the Python Discourse forum moderation. The SC is responsible for the business of the core development team, not the forum. The fact that all of this played out on the forum, and the fact that Mr. Peters was concurrently suspended from the forum, are implementation details.

But yes, it *absolutely is* the responsibility of anyone who makes a formal reprimand, to ensure that the reprimand is a) clear and b) provably based in established policy.

And by saying "everybody who is breaking the rules" you beg the question.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 30, 2024 3:07 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> He acknowledges that he was oblivious to how his style was being understood differently by others.

"being understood differently by others", OMG... utmost subjectivity going absolutely nowhere.

Different groups have different norms about what is socially acceptable. For instance, "blasphemy" is legal in some places and not in others. But every social group (except Python?) tries to define what these norms are and what lines should not be crossed. Also, those norms evolve (slowly) based on precedence. It's not easy and it's certainly not an exact science but there's at the very least an _attempt_ to define and share these norms so people can comply with them, otherwise anything goes. It's obviously impossible to anticipate and avoid everyone's "triggers" when discussing in a public place; that's why social norms are necessary and always have been in every social group since humanity existed.

I sincerely hope the specific norm that was not followed and the specific line that was crossed was spelled out somewhere. This obviously does not require disclosing anyone's identity. But seeing this "being understood differently by others" does not make me optimistic; neither do the other complaints about the SC.

Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Jan 10, 2025 13:40 UTC (Fri) by zahlman (guest, #175387) [Link]

>I've been on the side of the SC. A bunch of people show up claiming they won't believe you unless you give intimate details about the victims. The problem is that you know how communities treat the victims, and, honestly, how the people claiming they'll believe the victims *actually* behave.

I, too, have acted in a moderator capacity in the past. I have also seen people asking for justification for moderator actions, of all sorts, from all angles, across decades of Internet use.

What I have *not* seen is behaving anything like what you describe, in any of that time. Certainly what I see in relation to Mr. Peters' banning is completely different.

First off, you are taking for granted that a conflict of this sort necessarily involves "victims" in the first place. Even if we take the CoC WG's allegations (https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a...) at face value and treat them as proven, none of them demonstrate the existence of any individual being "victimized". They are presented as complaints about saying objectionable things in a *public* space which are *not directed at anyone*. Their putative "victims" are classes of people, treated generally, on some ground assumption that saying certain things inherently causes harm to certain groups (without any specific person needing to claim such harm).

Second: again IMX, nobody ever goes around "claiming they'll believe the victims". People who will take accusations as truth don't object in the first place. For everyone else, the phrase "believe the victims" is itself rhetorical subterfuge - it deliberately commits the logical fallacy of assuming the consequent (Wikipedia currently redirects this to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question ). People claim that they won't believe something unless you present *a logically valid reason to believe it*; the entire point of the skepticism is that it is possible, in principle, for a non-victim to make false accusations. None of that has anything to do with the identity, nor any particular characteristics, of the person making the claim. In those cases where such a person exists.

Third: no, I don't "know" such a thing. I can tell from your rhetorical what you're implying, and what I know from my personal experience is that it is completely false. Many people I know personally have suffered real harm as a result of being falsely characterized as "harassing" "victims" - absolutely groundless charges, that nevertheless stick because of the surrounding political and ideological climate. Please do not propagate this.

Finally: suppose we ignore all of these objections to the "victim" framing, and treat "victim" as if it meant "complainant". The discussion (see e.g. starting at https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-mo...) shows us that people objecting to Peters' ban are not trying to identify a complainant. They in fact broadly suspect (as I do) that the CoC WG acted on its own accord, without any specific complaint being received, based on deciding themselves that there is something objectionable in the posts in question (never mind that there is no common knowledge of what set of posts this might be). Or, alternately phrased, that the complaint comes from within the group, but is not necessarily based on any personal objection but rather on a prescriptive judgment that others might object.

What is sought here is an explanation of the charges, *not* an identification of who was putatively wronged or putatively took offense. This is abundantly clear in subsequent posts e.g. https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-mo..., and from https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-mo... following onward. When people actually do try to follow official procedures (https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-mo...) to get more information, they are still stonewalled, and it's still abundantly clear that they are *absolutely not* trying to obtain the identity of a complainant, and certainly not for the purpose of harassment.

In short, they want is: a clear explanation of the nature of the "something bad"; a clear reason to believe that it happened; and a clear argument that the bad thing is, in fact, bad.

The CoC WG has failed on all counts. Further, where anyone in the community could decipher the supposed bad actions, and match them up to specific words from Mr. Peters, the idea of any actual harm has appeared ludicrous. So I will admit that some of these requests are in bad faith - which is to say, people appear to have already concluded (as I have) that the CoC WG *cannot possibly* offer such explanations, because they are clearly in the wrong.

But beyond simply failing, CoC WG *actively refuses* (https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-mo...) to "discuss details of cases with third parties" - including explaining what on Earth they were talking about in their initial pronouncement of wrongdoing. (Note that the author of that post is one of two people common to the CoC WG and the moderation team of the Python Discourse forum.) Those charges, to the extent that any third party can identify what they're referring to, are identified by those third parties as utterly absurd. And then others wonder why the CoC WG faces any resistance. It's amazing.

> I'm interested to see what Peters thinks of this statement in six months time. He's already acknowledged that he was dismissive of what was explained to him and that it didn't seem reasonable *to him*.

What little Mr. Peters says about it in his "mea culpa" does not connote any kind of "dismissiveness". Contrary to your explanation downthread, no, someone who *tries to* take an outside view (that of a "reasonable person") and figure out how someone else's facially absurd complaint could be understood as valid, is not being "dismissive". If I were to accuse you of something and you thought my accusation was absurd, you would be going above and beyond (and commendably so) by trying to figure out reasons you might be wrong. And if you failed in this task, you could simply explain to me why you thought my accusation was absurd, and/or ask me to explain it in more detail. And it would be my responsibility to try. At the very least, if you can't even tell *what action I'm referring to*, I have failed as a moderator.

I honestly can't tell a difference between Mr. Peters' supposedly new and improved posting style vs. how he wrote prior to July. But neither can I understand even a remotely plausible basis for anyone objecting to the latter in the first place. On the "mea culpa" page, Mr. Peters links the forum post (https://discuss.python.org/t/for-your-consideration-propo...) he understands (as I understood his explanation) to have been where he supposedly "made light of sexual harassment". Even the little bit that Mr. Peters cedes with this "mea culpa" is, in my mind, wholly unnecessary. Where he says "Now it makes some sense to me how someone could take offense at my message about sexual harassment", to me it is utterly beyond comprehension. If you believe you can explain, please do so.

>He also conflates a bunch of people disbelieving the claims as if that's evidence of some sort.

No; people are not simply "disbelieving" the claims - they are trying to understand what posts were even referred to. But regardless, the burden of proof is on those who make claims. If the CoC WG wishes to claim, for example, that Mr. Peters "used potentially offensive language or slurs, in one case even calling an SNL skit from the 1970s using the same slur “genuinely funny”" (a claim the CoC WG actually did make), then they need to *at least* be able to explain whether this supposedly occurred on the forum, on a mailing list or else somewhere private (not anything more specific than that!). As far as anyone can tell, there is abundant reason to believe that this charge refers to https://discuss.python.org/t/for-your-consideration-propo... and to the now-deleted post it follows on from, and *no* reason to believe it refers to *anything else* (which makes the use of the phrase "in one case" intellectually dishonest). But in those posts (I saw the deleted one before it was deleted), *objectively speaking* Mr. Peters *did not* use a slur (which is different from simply writing one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinc...), *did not even write* a slur; arguably did not even *allude to* a slur (since I disagree that the word in question is in fact any such thing), and *did not* call the skit in question "genuinely funny". Instead, he made a tangential comment about *the show, in general, during that era* being "genuinely funny" - as part of the allusion that he used to allow people to know what word he meant without actually writing it. (Not to mention, at the time, the series of skits in question was a significant cultural touchstone representing the increasing empowerment of women in American society.)

By the way: if you do a search on the Python Discourse Forum, you can see that while it's fairly rare for people there to use profanity, it's routinely allowed to stand.

> The loudest of the community have made it very clear that they believe that eminence should be the primary consideration when evaluating a forum member's behavior and they should consider why the Steering Committee has little choice but to ignore them

If "eminence" was a typo for "evidence", then no, anyone who wishes to suspend or ban community members on the basis of conduct has an absolute moral obligation to be able to demonstrate that the objectionable conduct actually occurred.

If "eminence" was meant as is, I refer to JamesErik's objection; the community is not saying any such thing.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 10:19 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link] (7 responses)

I hope we don't see childish claims like these anymore in 2025:
https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a...

Lots of which-could-be-seen's. A contributor like Tim should've never been suspended based on vague claims. Basically everything can be seen as the total opposite given enough imagination.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 12:18 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (6 responses)

"A contributor like"? It sounds like you're allowing someone to behave bad in interpersonal situation, because he has technical prowess. This can't be a justification, society doesn't work that way.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 12:50 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

There's plenty of societies that do work that way, including ours. Just look at what populist and/or ultra-rich *censored*s can and do get away with.

Linus got away with an infamously large heap of abusive language as well, and still does to some extent, but a few people did take him to task for it and he did change for the better. Was anything like that approach attempted, or even considered, in this case?

The question isn't how badly Tim Peters screwed up. The question is whether the way the issue was handled by "the community" (or rather the people who profess to speak for it, since much was handled behind closed doors, and apparently without much communication to, let alone with, Mr. Peters) is in any way conductive to furthering Python and/or motivates people to start (or continue) contributing to it.

The *answer* to that question is, as far as I am concerned, a resounding NO.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 13:35 UTC (Thu) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link] (2 responses)

You’re right, *nobody* involved in the project should be suspended like this based on a completely opaque process and a list of fabricated offences. But when it’s a prolific senior contributor the damage is more immediate, and I think senior contributors are a lot more likely to run into the kind of political bullshit that got Peters targeted (essentially, disagreeing too much with an influential faction about policy so they decided a struggle session would be an easy way to shut him up). You’re begging the question talking about ‘behaving badly in interpersonal situations’: there is no real evidence of Peters doing this, just a lot of ‘it sounds like’ (when it actually really doesn’t).

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 15:04 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

First you misrepresent my words, you "agree" with something I didn't write, then you continue with toxic vitrol ("targeted", "political"). I won't be dragged into a discussion like that.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 18:07 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> First you misrepresent my words

You blatantly misrepresented the words and intention of the great-grandparent comment in the first place.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 26, 2024 14:37 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link]

ALL the claims are subjective and vague, with presumption of guilt to prevent a pre-crime. It makes the Inquisition enlightened in comparison.

I know they're a pain to read at, but here they are:

- Overloading the discussion of the bylaws change (47 out of 177 posts in topic at the time the moderators closed the topic), which created an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which encouraged increasingly emotional responses from other community members. The later result of the vote showed 81% support for the most controversial of the bylaws changes, which demonstrates the controversy was blown out of proportion.
- Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”, concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment.
- Using potentially offensive language or slurs, in one case even calling an SNL skit from the 1970s using the same slur “genuinely funny”, which shows a lack of empathy towards other community members.
- Making light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment, which could be interpreted as harassment or creating an unwelcoming environment.
- Casually mentioning scenarios involving sexual abuse, which may be inappropriate or triggering for some audiences.
- Discussing bans or removals of community members, which may be seen as publishing private information without permission.
- Dismissing unacceptable behavior of others as a “neurodivergent” trait, which is problematic because it creates a stereotype that neurodivergent people are hard to interact with and need special treatment.
- Excessive discussion of controversial topics or past conflicts, which could be seen as sustained disruption of community discussions.
- Use of potentially offensive terms, even when self-censored or alluded to indirectly.
- Making assumptions or speculations about other community members’ motivations and/or mental health.

Stop the madness

Posted Dec 27, 2024 21:49 UTC (Fri) by JamesErik (guest, #17417) [Link]

> It sounds like you're allowing someone to behave bad in interpersonal situation

Or just maybe claims of "behav[ing] bad" have fallen flat because of an utter lack of evidence?

> because he has technical prowess

Or just maybe because he has a decades-long reputation for fair-minded, insightful, welcoming demeanor?

Seems poorly thought out

Posted Dec 31, 2024 20:12 UTC (Tue) by dberlin (subscriber, #24694) [Link]

Posting a list of claimed issues and then saying you don't want to engage because he said/she said won't help is hilariously passive aggressive at best.
That's just the start too.

The lawyer in me would tell you cargo culting a justice system of any sort is very hard, and I can't name a single successful instance of trying to do it like this (random untrained volunteers doing the best they can) except the groups that don't have to actually handle any complaints ;)

Either don't do it, or at the very least set reasonable expectations instead of idealistic ones you cannot possiblity fulfill without more people, time, and energy at the very least. Don't pretend it will be something it will not (ie a reasonable fair process), it will just make it worse.

You'll note that nowhere do I suggest spending the time and energy to "do it right" for any reasonable definition of right. That is because it is immense, and seems totally underestimated by every tech group who tries this.


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