> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
Currently, the text reads:
> This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...
Edit: I meant to post slightly more direct link in title: https://discuss.python.org/t/should-we-consider-ranked-choic...
Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from "Guido van Rossum's Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to "A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to clarify what actually happened.
Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don't disbelieve you-- but nobody can see it to confirm) why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something?
It's very confusing.
Edit: Answering my own question. There appears to be a kerfuffle afoot. Apparently the Steering Council has suspended a core developer for 3 months[0] but isn't naming the suspended developer or citing specific reasons why (per [1] and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed).
Apparently even mentioning the suspended person (without naming them) is enough for even Guido van Rossum to be censored. Wow.
Edit 2: The suspended developer is Tim Peters[3].
Edit 3: Altered paragraph "Edit:" from "...or the reason why[1] (" to "...or citing specific reasons why (per [1]".
Edit 4: Added "which did not succeed" after "...vote of no confidence in the council".
[0] https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co...
[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...
[3] https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
But, anyway, who is the "Steering Council" and how come they have more influence than the 2 people who basically created python the language and python the community?
Originally discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180
How in the hell do you have the balls or ovaries to ban the creator --for something so inane. It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power she has in such a classless way. So utterly petty defying belief.
I hope those dweebs get voted out pronto. That's an absurd abuse of power.
People who trip like that have no business having any power or control.
[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...
Flags may be cast by anyone, and this will eventually result in automatic hiding - flags on Discourse are weighted according to the "trust level" of those raising them.
My guess is that people perceived this as a passive-aggressive objection to Tim Peters' suspension. It has definitely been permitted up until now to refer to this (although everyone seemed to be avoiding the name on principle), but there seems to be an expectation that people should "read the air" now and stop talking about it - hence posts like https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p... and https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-... .
> and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed
The call was retracted, which is not surprising. The Steering Council isn't the root of the problem, anyway. That would be the Code of Conduct Work Group (https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-...), which is not elected (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership), has membership overlapping other important groups (4 of them are on the PSF Board of Directors - https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 - and Brett Cannon and Łukasz Langa are Discourse forum moderators) and enforces the Code of Conduct according to hidden rules that betray the neutrality of that document (https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enfor...) counter to the wishes of one of the original drafters of said document (https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship... ; https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-o... etc.).
It's also noteworthy that the Steering Council - consisting of 5 core devs - apparently also now requires a "communications liaison" (https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=2...) who gets a glowing write-up in official updates on the forum (such as https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-ju...) - which are not posted by said liaison. I have no idea why this should be necessary, nor is there anything in PEP 13 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/) about this position existing. It seems that this person was selected entirely out-of-process.
> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
So he was banned for asking about someone who knows about voting. Transitive meta banning? I guess anyone asking about Guido’s post will also get banned.
Imo that kind of deliberate intransparency is a massive red flag. Here for example I can choose to see hidden comments and make up my own mind about the content, which is excellent. Even if I don't use the feature, the fact that I could if I wanted to is a massive plus for trust in the process.
The same cannot be said for in-numerous other acts of flagging and hiding. Almost all posts from Clay in this thread has been flagged and hidden; you can't even make sense of Guido's replies to him because of that.
https://discuss.python.org/t/approval-voting-vs-instant-runo...
Would be happy for admin to do so, if that's something that's done on this site.
They abuse their power by banning any opposition and then using said infrastructure to libel and defame their opponents.
Google already fired one or two of them. I do not know what is required to restore the health of Python.
I would appreciate more information about this.
https://youtu.be/X2xlQaimsGg?feature=shared&t=13
FYI, Python is named after Monty Python , who got into all kinds of trouble making fun of and saying things that upset basically everyone (religion to LGBT), which is ironic considering the circumstances.
I didn't complain without a dog in the hunt, but I noticed those that did were implied to be monsters, and told that their mild disagreement "would not look good to history." Unfortunately a few years later I can say the opposite.
Well, Guido made his bed, now it's time to lie in it. ;-)
It's your contention that people getting up in arms about not changing the name of the 'master' branch specifically look good now, with hindsight? Can't say I agree.
Something substantial perhaps, say promoting under-represented folks within psf would be something. You can’t eat branch names.
Turns out it's a slippery slope, who would've thunk.
Ten years ago, Debian saw three well respected members of the Technical Committee resign — including two former project leaders, one of whom designed the .deb packaging system — during what I see as a similarly heated vote/counter-vote power struggle. This Python saga feels similar.
(I also don't think they should be allowed to cite things said 5 years ago as a reason to ban someone today. How could that still be relevant?)
As well as a straightforward way to report bureaucrats and have them removed from the community.
Based on the same process as other abuses that may already be included int the code of conduct.
When Codes of Conduct were first introduced, they sounded like a benign concept. But now it's becoming increasing clear that they're the Trojan horse that allows the inmates to take over the asylum.
Another overview (easy to understand, but some non-central information is inaccurate), https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5819317/nixos-commits-a-purg...
Concrete events & evidences, https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_eviden...
Probably has something to do with the codified formal structures necessary for various committees/ decision making groups.
But it's interesting. This kind of stuff happens in ECMA, Rust, Python and a few others. Go seems to have escaped. Maybe because it's a corporate owned Lang? Similarly no drama in the Typescript world.
Additionally, corporate structure is typically much more hierarchical. If someone has a complaint they can take it up with Anders, if he disagrees that’s it (unless your name happens to be Scott G or Satya N). This is, by and large, a good and efficient way to structure things.
In short, the Go module proxy causes an excessive traffic volume on git VCS sources with frequent clones of unchanged repos. Regardless of whether or not the developer is/was always reasonable in how he discussed this, he was absolutely right about this being a hostile behavior from the official Go proxy that is the result of bad/insufficient engineering. The team's suggestions to simply stop refreshing his one domain were also not sufficient given that the problem clearly impacts all Go module VCS hosts.
The developer also appeared to be banned in a way that violated the Go CoC's own provisions around fair notice and a proper hearing, which is super disappointing to see.
There's that saying about the inverse correlation between impact of the project/the stakes, and people being drama lords.
I would expect there to be a class of admin in here that do not actually contribute code but have created positions of authority over the project based on "community contribution" only. There's a particular type of person that does this and derives great satisfaction from it. I'm not going to criticise this - often the "community contribution" is real and beneficial - but I don't think it helps when the focus of the team managing the project moves away from the purely technical.
[0] I'm sure it still happens, but I no longer witness it.
There was a tremendous amount of frustration around the walrus operator, which led to him stepping down.
All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
And it wasn't just Guido. Tim was a big advocate for all three of those super powers when he was more influential. They banned Tim and they censored Guido, so go figure.
[edit: I am somewhat surprised people want to down-vote a factual statement, which in part aligns to the OP who changed the title of the post since it was being wrongly inferred his posting rights had gone, not a single post was being hidden. As the saying goes "you do you"]
A more drastic analogy, this is like getting kicked out of your house by your kids. Altough I see that this one is flawed and exaggarated
Can we help in increasing understanding on why people have certain opinions in this topic?
Or do you kinda know why and are expressing a kind of disagreement and disapproval of holding the opinions?
However, I don’t think reflexive actions like what you’re suggesting will sway anybody who’s not already convinced, or really help in any other way. Disruptive demonstrations can occasionally work IRL when they can serve to convey a concern to people who wouldn’t otherwise notice it, or to assure like-minded people that they’re not alone. Online forums, by contrast, are both lacking in passersby and plentiful in tools for suppressing disruptions.
Furthermore, I don’t think you can really outpolitick a politician on this low a level. Well-motivated and well-publicized forks could work. General apathy and nonparticipation could work. Other ways of voting with your feet could also work, if you can think of one. But you can’t argue (collaborate on converging to the truth) with an opponent who’s completely convinced of their own rightness and righteousness, only debate them (attempt to expose each other’s faults to an audience). Debating a politician won’t work, because they’ll crush you. It’s a large part of what being a good politician is, after all.
> Why do you want to stick your opinion into something that you hadn't previously known about? What are you going to positively contribute to the discussion that will move things forward? How does that help?
A prudent response, the revised ending of "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Drama Driven Development is truly the paradigm of the last 5 years.
The benefits of a sovereign are that they limit the amount of privileges that can be extracted from an political system. Obviously monarchs have their downsides, but if people can just up and fork the project, those downsides are limited.
I have not paid attention in years, and with the acknowledgment that some of the contributors there were their own worst enemy and/or not without sin, but you should really poke around http://wikipediareview.com/ - to see just how untrue that often is.
(I'm talking confidential email lists, whose existence is not to be confirmed, IRC channels, brigading, and far worse).
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
As is often the case, there is usually more to the story and we would be better off learning what really happened instead of immediately jumping to conclusions and then blaming people based on those conclusions. Otherwise we look rather silly when it ends up that it was all just a mistake and we risk ruining a good thing by our rash judgements.
http://web.archive.org/web/20240829000336/https://discuss.py...
http://web.archive.org/web/20240829004501/https://discuss.py...
Its knowledge requirements of the voters are such that I would opposed it for general, political cases.
To some extent, the moderators are obligated to treat everyone equally. If they wouldn't let you or me relitagate past drama here, why should they let anyone? The core team should be setting the example for how other people should behave. If the core team doesn't agree with the values that they claim to agree to, and show this disdain by not enforcing their own rules, then why would they bother creating that governance structure in the first place? They are just being consistent with the processes that they agreed to and subjected themselves to. That's governance. Personally, I think it would be more alarming to the community if certain people didn't have to follow the rules.
As far as I can tell, there is no mention of not discussing the original decision in general. If there was, nobody seems to be following the rules as there are 8 billion Reddit threads on the topic. I knew nothing about this and had Names Named in about 3 seconds of searching. As a result, I don't think there is some sort of conspiracy taking place. Enough ink has been spilled on this issue; does it really need to be brought up again in a thread about voting systems?
More seems it's just embarrassing to the committee so they banned it.
If the banning of the member alluded to was inappropriate, there is a time, place, and tact to address that. If the process does not allow for that, then you work towards changing the process. If the governing body doesn't allow for that, then why the heck would you make a comment that could derail a discussion regarding how that governing body is elected?
I agree. But didn't he give up the Benevolent Dictator for Life
moniker? Sounds like a King Lear situation...
Since now we will divest us both of moderation authority,
Interest of ban-hammering, cares of tweets,--
Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our highest privilege in the comments forum may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge. Tim,
Our eldest-born, speak first.No one is above god's law (aka physics).
No one is above the _spirit_ of [man's] laws.