removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/14/2021 8:08 AM, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> On 4/14/21 9:18 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>> Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
>>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send 
>>> abusive or
>>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the 
>>> wiki or
>>> website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
>>
>> I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
>> dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
>> about that once.
>>
>> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
>> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
>> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks. Another,
>> particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
>> autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
>> code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
>> potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.
>>
>> Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
>> whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
>> if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
>> in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
>> there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
>> with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.
>>
>> Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
>> assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
>> the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
>> hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
>> Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
>> have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
>> online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
>> cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.
>>
>> You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
>> *without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
>> manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>>
>> You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
>> and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
>> play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.
>>
>
> I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place 
> unwelcoming.  I wouldn't associate with them in physical space, I 
> don't want to associate with them here.  And yes, I fully realize 
> there are other ways I can choose to not associate with them here.

We've generally avoided kicking folks off the lists -- it's been done 
once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about 
it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into 
moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.  
As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I 
don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those 
individuals from posting.

Jeff