In my experience watching their mods over the years, they seem to have a big problem with other people having opinions they disagree with.
I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
And they're moderators, so, what they say is already "the law" (at least in their eyes) anyways... don't need a code of conduct to tell people the mods have the final say regardless.
Just to be clear: in some drama about one year ago the moderation team considered that people could be banned solely based on their political opinions if those happened to be right-wing / MAGA / anti-wokism.
Then the drama extended because people, even if they weren't right-wing/MAGA/anti-wokism had to agree with the moderators' political opinions.
So when TFA writes this:
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
What they really mean is: "We went so far left our brains left our bodies and we now consider anyone to the right of Stalin to be a nazi".
Why do these useless Wrong Think police keep inserting themselves in open source projects? No one wants the drama they bring to their projects. People are just trying to build software... Open source is not a platform for forcing political and social views on people, and not wanting to be a part of that isn't equivalent to opposing it.
If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
You know, I watched people fight over this post for hours. If you tracked positive and negative total upvotes it would look like a sine wave. I'm kind of surprised it was so contentious though because my experience of politics at startups is basically everyone either pretends to have the same opinion as the founders (if they're openly political) or politics is made outright taboo. I think politics is something that really does invite a lot of drama and being flawed creatures as we are, humans have trouble being objective.
Can you imagine if HN allowed politics. I think most of us here would hate it. RN, hacker news feels like this nice little oasis and even when major political events happened you could come here and it would always have gems. I just think we would be happier if that applied to open source, too. I've often wished to have a plugin that just filters all political stuff from my screen. I will probably develop it one day.
HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.
This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.
Some random thoughts from the thread:
1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.
2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…
3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…
P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.
Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
The unelected mods who resigned were refusing accountability being enforced by the elected steering committee, which tells you what you need to know about how the mods ran things.
The moderation log both explains it very well, and not at all, depending on perspective. When you follow the Discourse and other community forums for a while, you notice that moderation is unevenly applied. Some get permanent bans, other bans counted in hours, if at all. When you are familiar with the names in the moderation log, and the lack of consistency in ruling, you see a very clear moderation bias.
Funny you should mention that. Meanwhile over in the Ruby camp, where they've been trying to gather signatures to run DHH out on a rail (pun intended), someone submitted a PR to replace the entire "open letter" with that document. (It was of course promptly rejected as a troll, which it was, but I was still amused.)
By “political bickering”, do you mean debates over organizational direction/technical flame wars, debates over political philosophy/ideology, or something else?
I'm a NixOS committer. I avoid Discourse and Matrix and thus avoid almost all drama.
My impression is that:
* NixOS had light governance for many years, which used to be enough, but wasn't enough to adress disagreements as of around 2022.
* A moderation team partially filled that governance gap, but it was seen to be politically motivated, and is now being held accountable by an elected body (the steering committee).
* This shift in power has resulted in tensions.
* NixOS users skew a little idiosyncratic in general. I'd hazard a guess this coincides with wanting full control of their machines, and being willing to upend the status quo to do so.
I'm hopeful that as more governance is rooted in the elected body, we'll have less tension over time.
I'm thankful for all contributors who make NixOS for what it is today.
Same here! I don’t have a problem with people having different opinions than mine, but when they start banning core contributors for that, it’s just a matter of time before ship goes down. I kind of hoped I was wrong and after all this time the dust settled - not because I was going to use it again, but because the project is a very cool idea.
Why is around 50% of the news I read about NixOS about political infighting?
For no other community this is the case. The technology appears interesting, but from the outside it definitely looks like a continuously collapsing project.
I've had NixOS on a list to give it a shot one day when I wanna tinker on a weekend project, it's been on that list for quite some time now and just haven't had time for it. I hear good things about the project when I ask other devs, but all I read these days about Nix is about infighting, politics, global bans, governance wrongdoings, and drama.
From the outside, this concerns me for the longevity of the project. I'm sure if it makes it through it could be better for it; but it is concerning and makes me push it further down the list to try.
I don't really have much context and I do not know those people but every time this type of post pop up on HN I read it. It is obvious those people are mentally ill and terminally online.
And it is not even about politics and woke, I do not think there were any political statement here. It is just obvious this again was written by a crazy person.
So some people had a problem with the Nix leadership for years, they made numerous drama and forked the project (as they have the right to).
But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems...
I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
> And it is not even about politics and woke, I do not think there were any political statement here. It is just obvious this again was written by a crazy person.
There may not have been political statements here but the people doing this absolutely are motivated by their politics.
> But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems... I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
Presumably they aren't helping forks because they despair of any fork getting anywhere near the traction of the original.
################## MODERATION TEAM REMAINS IN PLACE - NOTHING HAS CHANGED ##################
If you review the post and refresh it frequently, you will observe the censorship in action.
Some instances of censorship are quite extreme. They censor individuals for even the mildest comments. I saw one person get flagged for linking to Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis and requesting more scientific discussion. The TLDR was something like "More of THIS" were "THIS" was a hyperlink to Dolstra's PHD thesis that sparked NixOS. I wanted to reply, stepped away for a meal, and by the time I returned, the comment had been censored.
NixOS isn't a technical project anymore. It's just Dolstra's stole life's work being kept in life support. I don't care which side of the political spectrum you are... this should anger you. They stole this man's life's work through distasteful political shenanigans.
It's like removing Linus from Linux (unsuccessful removal attempts), Stallman from FOSS (unsuccessful removal attempts), and Eelco Dolstra from NixOS (removed).
I don't care for these people thoughts or beliefs, I see them for what they are, thought leaders. People that ACTUALLY move us (humanity) FORWARD. They should stay in place leading their respective movements for as long as possible or until they break the LAW. Not some "constitution of NixOS" or "bylaws of NixOS", the actual LAW of their respective jurisdiction.
Usually when popular projects have this much turmoil there a fork.
Centos stream
Node to deno
Etc etc
Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay. And boom. There’s peace again.
> Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay.
v.s.
> Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way stay and those that don’t gravitate towards that.
now let's spend the next few years arguing which of these is the correct proposition.
sure, it's more complicated: there's questions about _what_ to fork (Nix is an _ecosystem_, not necessarily a single repository), there are certain things which can't trivially _be_ forked (e.g. a multi-hundred-TB S3 cache that's actually critical infrastructure; project websites, wikis, uncountable automation services). how do you coordinate all the details of forking, if forking isn't actually as trivial as pushing the "fork" button? that requires highly capable leaders, and if the ecosystem were good at finding and promoting that type of leader, then it wouldn't be in this place to begin with.
more optimistically, various parts of this ecosystem _have_ been forked, or reshaped, by various entities. things happen; sometimes that happening is just a lengthy process.
37 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.0 ms ] thread> The Nix Steering Committee (SC) (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) is the elected community leadership body. It was established as part of the Nix governance constitution (https://github.com/NixOS/org/blob/main/doc/constitution.md) last year, after which the first elections were held, where 450 contributors voted for the current members. This years election (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announc...) is currently in progress. The SC generally is responsible over project direction and community matters, including management of teams. While most responsibilities are delegated, the SC has the authority to step in when necessary.
> The moderation team (https://nixos.org/community/teams/moderation/) was established before the SC or constitution existed. The initial moderators were appointed from RFC 102 (https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0102-moderati...), with the mandate to self-select successors. Over the years the team has changed members a lot, none of the initial members are part of it anymore, and the last larger rotation happened last year. The responsibilities include moderation according to the Code of Conduct (CoC) (https://github.com/NixOS/.github/blob/master/CODE\_OF\_CONDU...) of the official community spaces, which is mostly the Discourse and a bunch of Matrix channels. Earlier this year the now-existing SC took on the responsibility of approving new mod team members and CoC changes (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/code-of-conduct-and-moderation...).
I get the feeling like their insistence on things like CoCs is ultimately just used as a false flag to censor "wrong" opinions based on colorful interpretations of subjective terminology used in the policy.
And they're moderators, so, what they say is already "the law" (at least in their eyes) anyways... don't need a code of conduct to tell people the mods have the final say regardless.
Then the drama extended because people, even if they weren't right-wing/MAGA/anti-wokism had to agree with the moderators' political opinions.
So when TFA writes this:
> apparently trying to address perceptions of political bias by making political appointments
What they really mean is: "We went so far left our brains left our bodies and we now consider anyone to the right of Stalin to be a nazi".
If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
Can you imagine if HN allowed politics. I think most of us here would hate it. RN, hacker news feels like this nice little oasis and even when major political events happened you could come here and it would always have gems. I just think we would be happier if that applied to open source, too. I've often wished to have a plugin that just filters all political stuff from my screen. I will probably develop it one day.
This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.
Some random thoughts from the thread:
1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.
2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…
3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…
P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
2) this post is a good summary of the entire situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th...
3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.
Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
Good riddance, and easily enough replaced.
Could someone point me to examples of controversial moderation decisions that were “interfered” with?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA
My own permanban is detailed in this post:
https://srid.ca/nixos-mod
https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/blob/main/moderation-log...
I'm not aware of any other open source project so consumed with virtue signal bikeshedding.
https://discourse.nixos.org/c/learn/9
My impression is that:
* NixOS had light governance for many years, which used to be enough, but wasn't enough to adress disagreements as of around 2022.
* A moderation team partially filled that governance gap, but it was seen to be politically motivated, and is now being held accountable by an elected body (the steering committee).
* This shift in power has resulted in tensions.
* NixOS users skew a little idiosyncratic in general. I'd hazard a guess this coincides with wanting full control of their machines, and being willing to upend the status quo to do so.
I'm hopeful that as more governance is rooted in the elected body, we'll have less tension over time.
I'm thankful for all contributors who make NixOS for what it is today.
Welp.
For no other community this is the case. The technology appears interesting, but from the outside it definitely looks like a continuously collapsing project.
Lots of talk about them, but nobody will just say what they are?
From the outside, this concerns me for the longevity of the project. I'm sure if it makes it through it could be better for it; but it is concerning and makes me push it further down the list to try.
And it is not even about politics and woke, I do not think there were any political statement here. It is just obvious this again was written by a crazy person.
So some people had a problem with the Nix leadership for years, they made numerous drama and forked the project (as they have the right to). But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems...
I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
There may not have been political statements here but the people doing this absolutely are motivated by their politics.
> But strangely none of those forks really got any traction or are going anywhere it seems... I am wondering why are those unhappy contributors helping the Lix project or some other forks?
Presumably they aren't helping forks because they despair of any fork getting anywhere near the traction of the original.
But that shouldn't be NixOS's problem.
If you review the post and refresh it frequently, you will observe the censorship in action.
Some instances of censorship are quite extreme. They censor individuals for even the mildest comments. I saw one person get flagged for linking to Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis and requesting more scientific discussion. The TLDR was something like "More of THIS" were "THIS" was a hyperlink to Dolstra's PHD thesis that sparked NixOS. I wanted to reply, stepped away for a meal, and by the time I returned, the comment had been censored.
NixOS isn't a technical project anymore. It's just Dolstra's stole life's work being kept in life support. I don't care which side of the political spectrum you are... this should anger you. They stole this man's life's work through distasteful political shenanigans.
It's like removing Linus from Linux (unsuccessful removal attempts), Stallman from FOSS (unsuccessful removal attempts), and Eelco Dolstra from NixOS (removed).
I don't care for these people thoughts or beliefs, I see them for what they are, thought leaders. People that ACTUALLY move us (humanity) FORWARD. They should stay in place leading their respective movements for as long as possible or until they break the LAW. Not some "constitution of NixOS" or "bylaws of NixOS", the actual LAW of their respective jurisdiction.
Centos stream
Node to deno
Etc etc
Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay. And boom. There’s peace again.
v.s.
> Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way stay and those that don’t gravitate towards that.
now let's spend the next few years arguing which of these is the correct proposition.
sure, it's more complicated: there's questions about _what_ to fork (Nix is an _ecosystem_, not necessarily a single repository), there are certain things which can't trivially _be_ forked (e.g. a multi-hundred-TB S3 cache that's actually critical infrastructure; project websites, wikis, uncountable automation services). how do you coordinate all the details of forking, if forking isn't actually as trivial as pushing the "fork" button? that requires highly capable leaders, and if the ecosystem were good at finding and promoting that type of leader, then it wouldn't be in this place to begin with.
more optimistically, various parts of this ecosystem _have_ been forked, or reshaped, by various entities. things happen; sometimes that happening is just a lengthy process.