Wait, is this thread also being closed? Why?
Haha. Maybe to prove the post correct? 
Seriously, it writes
Non-technical topics of the Julia community, including announcements, founding/deprecation of Julia related websites or local communities, new publications or other resources, advertisements, etc.
under the Community category, and apparently, this thread does not even belong to that implied by etc.
There is not enough bandwidth for this thread…
Be concise. Constructive criticism and suggestions are welcome, but high-traffic forums do not generally have the bandwidth for extensive discourse. Consider writing a blog post if you feel that you have enough to say on a particular subject.
I think the reason is that these threads tend to lead to the exact same result as the plots thread. Though 4 or 24 hours isn’t a lot for discussion to take place.
If the topic is unwanted I guess you could argue that it should be closed immediately, and if it’s wanted it should stay open for longer than a day. Though, I don’t think it’s targeted specifically at this thread, it’s a general mechanism.
I was flagged and had my post hidden as well. Honestly, I’ve never had that happen on any forum, so I guess the rules are a bit more strict here than you might find elsewhere. But let’s be honest, many forums are filled with garbage and unconstructive arguments.
I accept my “censoring”, and simply adjust my activity here, and hope people who complain or ask for help will remember that open source software is not the same as paid-for software that comes with a support plan.
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The simple fact that this thread is being closed by someone else that is not me, the person who raised the issue, illustrates the severity of the censorship. The issue is not solved, we didn’t agree on any solution, and yet the discussion will be muted by tomorrow. 
It says “24 hours after last post.” The thread won’t close if it’s active. And this is standard procedure for many (or all?) threads now.
On the topic: yes, this forum is strict. Very strict. On the other hand, in the thread that prompted this (the Plots.jl thread), the Original Post was hostile, rude and plain uncivilized. It’s no wonder that moderators and committers get crabby over threads like that.
I don’t exactly understand why it spun out of control over the ‘@ debate’. Seems like the @ mention of the original author of Plots.jl was just an ordinary mistake. Sometimes active contributors disappear without trace or mention, and it can be a bit har do keep track of.
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Probably my fault. I should have used a friendlier tone to convey the same message.
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I for one would be glad if the culture here recovered from the constant bickering. I used to be much more active on discourse to answer questions, but this stream of negativity gets to me. I can’t help but read it if i do come across it, so as a consequence I bother less and less to look at things
I don’t understand this. In my mental image of what this forum should be, the concept censorship doesn’t even make sense (who would censor package announcements or code questions). Package feature-requests on discourse are a well meant but misguided idea to begin with (in my opinion anyway).
I hope the whole thing is just a phase and we converge back to a more factual, language-centred culture.
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Please do not see this as just another attack but I want to urge you to reflect on whether threads like these are actually helpful to the community as a whole.
I am currently advocating for Julia and open source in general in a very conservative environment. A thread on “censorship” as the top post in the community forum might be enough for a newcomer to conclude that the Julia community is toxic (which I do not believe) and not worth engaging with. My hard work evangelizing would be undone!
Since being on the internet these days is distressing enough (for me) I usually skip inflammatory threads so I am probably not qualified to comment on this.
Let’s assume though that the censoring was not an isolated incident and you were in the right. Is justice being served worth the cost of painting the community as a whole in a bad light? Would it not make more sense to discuss the issue with the responsible persons in private first to see whether the over-moderation was based on a misunderstanding?
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I think the rules are explained very well in the community guidelines/rules for the board. It’s the official discussion outlet so everything happens at the full control of the stewards.
There are other communities that are more autonomous (Reddit, gitter).
That is a great point. I now feel bad that I just contributed to that exact problem.
In light of this I would like to point out explicitly that I am very happy with the Julia community as a whole, and I am proud to be part of it. For example the perceived issue I stated in my previous post does not at all occur on the Julia Slack, which curiously enough is a much less formal environment.
Furthermore, every time I had any question or issue I thus far always received a quick and high quality answer from people far too overqualified to play tutor or tech support for me. I am very thankful for this.
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totally agree!
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every time I read censoring and dictator it gives me a hiccup. Those are much exaggerated terms for a forum. I think of some of the countries where I’ve travelled and/or of people living in certain regions.
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a personal/public opinion to @juliohm: I found your initial slap toward Tamas not right. Why didn’t you ask him with a direct message? Did you notice how ‘defusing’ he replied (he would have had all rights to defend him from an accusation, wouldn’t he?)? Later on here you didn’t provide an example, wished a nice Friday, didn’t react to the explications by ihnorton, nor the prolonged ‘thread-living-period’. No reaction regarding us vs. them. The last message simple reiterated ‘censorship’ and ‘dictatorship’ - … this is not community, this is not discussion! Hope you agree (after some consideration maybe, also feel invited to send me a message).
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I’m glad this thread will be closed. Otherwise it would stay in the
Latestcategory for a long time. [Edit: I was wrong here, much better to let the discussion open, thanks]
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I have removed the close timer because I think that it’s important for a community like this especially not to censor criticism about the community itself. There have been some flagged messages recently, but as far as I’m aware they have only been hidden when they descended into back-and-forth complaints about other people’s posts rather than anything about the topic at hand.
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If he was right then telling truth could be only way to the light for whole community.
For me - possibility that we could discuss this problem - is prove that this is not toxic space .
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The point was, that one has lots of possibilities to figure out communication issues with the mods in private before publicly declaring that the community is toxic.
And I’m pretty sure that most things we encounter here are communication issues between some people - I’d be very surprised to find a single ill intended person on this forum! So talking with them in private seems very natural, instead of building up a “me against the rest” atmosphere.
I think, it’s just very hard to understand the intention of people from the Internet you don’t even know, so everyone needs to be a bit more patient and less inflammatory to make an Internet discussion fruitful. I hope we can do this
is prove that this is not toxic space
that’s something very hard to prove in a discussion, since the proof should be what people perceived over the last years - you can’t really discuss that without citing the whole history of the Julia community.
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For some context, here’s the statistics on the number of flags over the life of this forum (63 is total, starting 10/2016):
Some of those (~10) are system-generated spam flags, the rest are user flags. There’s no disaggregated outcome statistics, but by a quick manual count:
- the moderators affirmed 29 flags (I believe it sends a note to the flagged author, but does not necessarily hide the post)
- out of those 29, the moderators hid 14 posts (13 this year).
That’s 13 posts this year, or about one per month out of about 3000 posts per month.
Note that normal flagged-hidden posts still show up in the list, grayed out, and the content can still be viewed with “View Hidden Content.” As such, it’s little more than a mild rebuke.
As far as I can tell, the moderators actually removed only 2 non-spam posts: 1 by request of the author, because they consolidated and flagged their own post, and the other because it was wildly in violation of the Community Standards.
(Note also that several posts by Julia core committers were flagged and hidden!)
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Thanks for your positive attitude! In this @ topic my POV is different than yours. But I am glad that my understanding could be enhanced with your understanding! You are right, it is simpler to accept opponent’s opinion if it is not ad hominem critique.
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@swissr I agree that I should have used the private message feature if I knew it existed or if I remembered it was there. In that sense, I could have avoided raising this issue to the attention of members that have no single relation to the topics being discussed here like yourself and most others. On the other hand, I think it is important to talk about this openly. This issue is quite real. I got private messages from other members saying that they are feeling the same, and usually about the same members. So it is not just me.
After feedback like the ones described above through private messages and other media, I decided to fight for this cause, and represent this minority that is affected by comments that aren’t so polite. Other people feel the same about the attitude of some users on this forum, but they are just afraid of sharing it publicly.
Now that we engaged in this conversation as a community, I think it is important to rethink about the types of answers on this forum that are helpful and educative. If there is one thing that I care about when I answer a question in a forum, this is education. I try to motivate my answer, put it into context and be a good resource to the person who is asking or just joining Julia. What I see sometimes here is this “one short sentence” type of answer that doesn’t convey much information, and which apparently was written with the only intent to show off or to diminish the person who asked the question. Not to mention judgements about topics that aren’t technical.
Regarding my specific example, which is just one example of a larger set of examples, I’d like to copy/paste the text here:
The Plots.jl package is not under heavy development anymore, what is happening now is mostly small fixes and code contributions from a few maintainers and users. The main creator of the package, Tom Breloff, is not touching the code anymore at the frequency he used to. (tagged Tom) can you elaborate on your plans for the project, specially given the recent announcement of promising alternatives like Makie.jl?
and say that I was genuinely interested in hearing Tom’s opinion on the matter.
I think part of my goal with this thread was achieved, which is awareness. This is not an isolated case, and things can be much better than they are currently. The next thing I will do is start contacting members in private whenever I see a post that is not helpful.
To all of you who participated in this thread, I thank you all. In particular, I would like to thank @StefanKarpinski for his attitude in making this discussion open again. In the case that this thread becomes too noisy, feel free to close it anytime, I shared what I wanted to share with you.
Best,
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I think part of the issue is that Discourse forces a linear discussion, when discussions are inherently not linear. @Tamas_Papp’s remark was correct (though maybe too strongly worded) that pinging Tom isn’t helpful. If this was something like Reddit or Slack, I’d make a little comment thread and note that he’s in the Gitter sometimes, or he’s quite active on Twitter so a DM there would probably work. However, these kinds of corrections, given the format of Discourse, tend to just show up in the linear thread and then have the feeling of derailing the thread. This makes it a little tough to make a judgement call for when to do this: I know pinging Tom will not give you a helpful answer and so to help you I should point you to the right outlets, but bringing this up could derail the main thread: is this something worth bringing up?
Well one thing to note though is that at this point there really aren’t too many new questions. As time goes on, the probability that a question has already been answered gets higher. A lot of questions can just be answered by linking to a different thread, package, blog post, etc. Usually if I’m on my phone I’ll just throw the link down and give a clarification if needed, but most of the time just pointing someone in the right direction is all that’s needed. I think most short answers are of this “already asked and answered” type.
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Just humble question from somebody who like to understand open source community better: Is observation really supporting this hypothesis?
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