Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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There's always two sides to every story, though. I don't know anything about what's going on (and I don't write Go), but there's a mention in the Twitter replies about further discussion on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/ppluux/peter_bourgo...

which links this document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1exmMfbgVCz3dRXOOlfUCYeiX...

which looks an entirely reasonable reason to formally ask someone to knock it off and take some time to chill. From the document, it seems that he has a policy of ignoring Slack moderators, took the fight to Twitter when his Slack account was temporarily deactivated, and has a pattern of such behavior.

If that document is to be believed, the punishment was not excessive and arbitrary. He got a temporary Slack ban, which was appropriate and measured, and then chose to continue escalating.

There's also this reply:

https://twitter.com/ahmetb/status/1438653799724294144

> @peterbourgon Many of us here have respect for u from a technical standpoint and learned from your talks/code. However it’s wrong to troll people on slack (because “this is internet”) and call them names on twitter for no apparent reason. I hope you can stand back and understand the mistake.

For what it's worth, I actually think it's a good sign that the CoC is equally enforced against a drafter of the CoC - the alternative is that there's a group of people who are sufficiently in the in-crowd that their behavior is the definition of what's acceptable and they get to do what they want. It's absolutely possible to abuse the power of CoCs, but this seems like the exact opposite.

The linked Google doc is not reasonable, it sounds reasonable because it is a one-sided depiction of the situation that is a) wordy b) completely omits the other side and c) is written in a style that resonates with CoC enforcers.

IOW, the most ruthless and stylistically talented person wins.

Here is the conversation that triggered the tribunal:

https://imgur.com/a/yPnWGXp

If that is a reason for a ban, you can ban 50% of people at Google and 100% of people at Google hired before 2010.

Evading a temporary ban is _universally_ reason for a permanent ban at any competently moderated venue.

No it isn't.

This channel is IRC or Slack. On IRC it is completely normal to log in under a different name. A new generation of "developers" is making up completely arbitrary rules to gain power and suppress productive persons.

It might be technically possible, but it certainly isn't socially acceptable or expected, and that hasn't changed in decades.

> For what it's worth, I actually think it's a good sign that the CoC is equally enforced against a drafter of the CoC

Agreed. The real issue I have with the way this was handled was it took the person who originally submitted the formal complaint to publish that formal complain for there to be any transparency into the process. Further, they updated the CoC hours after this event with language to cover what appears to be the reason he was banned. That's not very good optics. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of a committee being able to arbitrarily change and enforce rules post hoc.

I agree with you that that first bit is a problem. Though I don't know how to balance that with the desire for privacy / the desire to avoid publishing what amounts to a personal attack on the person, which can follow them into other communities, which is a penalty significantly beyond banning from a single community. In the case where the person was working in good faith but just had a spell of poor judgment, it seems ethical to allow them the "right to be forgotten," which implies not putting information anywhere that a search engine can index. And in the case where they're actually working in bad faith, they probably are going to be more than happy to make legal threats against everyone involved, which is a chilling effect on the submitter and the moderators. Even if they're correct and confident in everything they say, proving it in court is an unpleasant process.

Maybe a compromise is to say that complaints are private provided the person on the receiving end also agrees to keep the details private, and if they start to litigate it in public, it's permissible to publish the complaint. I'm not sure that helps you with the bad-faith participant, though, but in this case it seems like it's a good-faith contributor who just exercised a whole lot of bad judgment (and perhaps the implicit encouragement to not have this saga Googleable by future employers would have been good for everyone involved).

The other option is to have a strong community norm of contributing with pseudonyms, as e.g. Wikipedia does, and then your "right to be forgotten" is your right to pick a new pseudonym, and the whole moderation process can happen in public. But for something like Go, it's a norm to contribute with your real name as known to employers.

To your second point, the way I read it is not that they made an ex-post-facto change to the code of conduct for this incident, it's that this was already in the works (especially given his comment that he was involved in writing the CoC). If I'm misinterpreting that, then yes, I agree that it's a problem. I'm of the opinion that communities also need to state who can change the code of conduct and what process they'll use, and changing it in a way that surprises the community is bad.

(That said, as long as you specify it up front, I'm totally okay with the BDFL model for that, and I think it's the right model in most cases. A CoC is only as good or bad as the people who enforce it; its value is in setting expectations clearly.)

Lifetime bans from all spaces seem excessive and arbitrary to me for anything but the very worst hate, trolls and spam.

Imagine a society where people were regularly expelled permanently for annoying those in power.

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