What sort of goobledygood is this?

Oh certainly, but it's all a matter of perspective right? This response has made me, personally, more trusting of this organization. I have stronger faith that this group is willing to police misconduct and give serious punishments even to people that are otherwise considered paragons. Considering how many FOSS communities allow those with name recognition and technical prowess to act completely inappropriately without saying a word I personally find this refreshing.

It's the double-edged sword of it all and the place where that nonsense binary becomes a problem for the moderators: If they were to apologize for this action they're more likely to lose my faith.

> That's fine. He ignores it, he gets banned again, this time for two weeks or a month, etc., and after he's up to three or four bans, you eventually approach him and say "Tim, we've given you many chances to change your behavior, you've failed to do so, and now we're showing you the door. Please do not come back, ever."

To me the treadmill you've described looks daunting and like a waste of time when dealing with somebody that continues to cause problems and doesn't acknowledge their misbehavior.

> The point is not that you never respond with a serious punishment. The point is that you start with something proportionate, and escalate as needed, rather than jumping straight to a severe penalty which will be subject to blowback (see: this entire comments section).

This is a part of the nonsense binary I drew above that I think is important to clarify. If you're in the group that thinks Peters was justified and behaved appropriately, then you're going to complain loudly (see: this entire comments section). The other group though that is tired of reading his posts and simply leaves creates a different sort of blowback. It's silent, but that doesn't mean it isn't real. Those people just walk away. The moderators see that blowback in lower participation and other private metrics that they probably never share.

The sort of "tyranny of the loud" you're describing is part of why reply count/post rate can be such a signifier when looking for people that need to be moderated. They can make a lot of noise and give you the incorrect impression that they have a lot of support.

I will note here for completeness that I understand that the "tyranny of the quiet" or the "tyranny of the few" is what people who are against the codes of conduct and other moderation tools are saying they're afraid of. I think though that most of these comment sections are rife with people defending that side though.

> Frankly, this paragraph feels like exactly the same sort of thread-derailing non-sequitur that we've been talking about.

Your comment said that "On any reasonable forum" this certain action would be taken. I was trying to describe an experience that I think a reasonable person could have which wouldn't be satisfied by the action you describe. I'm sorry if it came across as off-topic to you.

> What the SC says in their statement is that Tim posted one specific thing that upset somebody,
> What you describe above is a bridge too far - it is not what the SC accused Tim of and has no bearing on anything.

It is not my reading of the statement by the Steering Council that this is all about exactly one person being upset. They say that they'd like to highlight "some key examples." In point three they say that people tried to point out "problematic statements." I sincerely doubt that it was just one post, one statement, or one person who was upset by this.

I am curious if you have a specific response to the second part of that particular thought experiment. The idea was to put yourself in the position of somebody that agrees wholeheartedly in the misconduct of the other person. Let's say you quit a forum entirely because of how they were behaving in the thread. Later somebody tries to convince you that the forum has changed and they'd love it if you gave it a second chance. When you return the forum you find the upsetting thread is still there and the person who drove you to leave was only given a one week ban. Do you think you'd return to the forum?

In this case it's clear that at least the Steering Council thinks it wouldn't be enough to convince the people to come back and have faith in the forum operating the way they would like it to.

>> It seems though that now you at least agree with the *conviction* and just not the *sentencing*.
> What do you mean by this?

Sorry, it seemed to me like your opinion had changed. In your first post it seemed like you didn't agree with Tim being banned at all. Then in the second post it seemed like you had come to agree with the ban, but thought the punishment was too harsh. This is what I meant by sentencing versus conviction. I'm making no assertion that *I've* changed your mind though.

>> Despite having proposed a bunch of thought experiments here, I'm not actually nearly as interested in legislating the sentencing. There's a lot more nuance to that and, honestly, a lot of people just never come back from a ban no matter what length it is.

> Then there's no problem starting with a week-long ban and escalating from there - it will work on "a lot of people" regardless.

Certainly it might work on me, but would it work on a person with enough clout and time in the community that there's a sorting algorithm named after him?

We should revisit this bit of the conversation in roughly three months. If Tim comes back with better behavior then there was a chance you were right and one week might have been enough. If he doesn't come back or immediately does the same thing again it'll seem like 3 months might have been too little from the start. For better or worse time will tell.