> There is a significant difference between coordinating community members to brigade and notifying community members about threads which contain factual inaccuracies about the projects technical work or history.
There is no functional difference when the obvious end-result is sending a horde of external people to influence voting in the thread, the definition of brigading.
> As an open-source project and a non-profit foundation, there is not a PR team or firm. It is perfectly normal to have an opt-in notification role for community members who wish to help clarify technical misconceptions in public discussions. It is a transparent and not uncommon practice.
This is absolutely not a common practice. Point to other notable FOSS projects that act in this manner, I've legitimately never seen it from other projects.
> HN has built-in protections against external voting and flagging. Comments that end up being flagged are rarely (if ever) substantive criticisms related to the OS or foundation. In nearly every case they are comments serving to derail technical discussions into personal attacks, armchair psychology, or unsubstantiated accusations against contributors and community members
The behavior of the core maintainers and broader community is still intrinsically tied to the technical aspects of the project, and the discussion at large. When there are threads about OpenAI (and other commercial AI providers) and the U.S., do people stop at discussing solely technical aspects of both, or do they understandably bring up relevant social and communal points as well?
A security project demands particularly high trust, which is where my concern stems. I would love to use GOS without worry, my hope is that the project can course-correct and eventually put this behavior behind them.
> (like repeatedly calling community members "sycophants" and "pathetic").
The community does in fact have some sycophants. I never asserted that every single member is one, or that they are the majority of the community (as they are not). And I called the behavior pathetic, not the member. Your framing of these comments is disengenious.
> Constructive technical criticism of the project happens every day, and is welcomed without issues. Expecting those discussions to remain focused on technical aspects and factual realities rather than personal hostility isn't "crashing out".
Firstly, the "crashing out" was in the context of random trolls messing with core contributors in official communication channels and successfully getting a rise out of them (IE "don't feed the trolls and they'll go away"), though I do infact argue expecting people to solely focus on technical aspects of an inherently multi-faceted project to be unreasonable, for reasons stated above.