It is clear that the current situation calls for a merit-based forum where people gain moderation power based on their trust level, not by invitation.
There are thousands of people on here, not just five. Moderators do very little on the forum ā moderator actions are rare. Are you advocating for a model where everyone is a moderator? Iām not aware of any forums where that is the case. If you dislike the current moderation, there must be some reason based on actions taken or not taken. Youāve expressed that you donāt think the current set of moderators is āsufficiently diverseā. That opinion presumably reflects some action you feel the moderators should or shouldnāt have taken. Iām asking what that action (or lack of it) was.
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Come on man. You canāt just attack Discourse.
At least provide a specific example of what you want changed to get the ball rolling.
Examples that youāve broughten up before are:
- Moderators mixing personal opinions with their voice of authority
- Moderators being too vocal and making disparaging remarks
- Powerful ingroups using likes to sway the attitude of a post
None of this has to get changed (because it may not be happening). But at least give some specifics.
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This seems right on point. My early experiences with the Julia community were very negative. I came in with far fetched ideas that got shot down quickly and in some cases harshly. In a lot of cases simpler and better implementations that accomplished the same thing eventually did make it in (dot vectorization, Query, _ lambdas (pending), etc). So Iām glad that my dumb ideas never made it in. It certainly is disheartening to come in with an idea youāre really passionate about and get shot down so quickly. But that seems par for the course in open-source development.
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A large number of open source communities are using Discourse, having replaced mailing lists & similar. This suggests that it canāt be entirely flawed, or at least must be better than the alternatives. It seems to be one of the best solutions to a difficult problem that is currently available.
Being specific about your grievances would allow the community to address them.
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Iām trying to better understand what weāre talking about here:
- some users with a lot of knowledge and skill are lacking in manners.
- the way administration/moderation rights are granted is not democratic.
@juliohm, would you agree that these two points are more or less inline with what youāre saying? If so, then Iād like to hear your opinions about:
- would you rather not hear a reply from these talented-curt people (I already asked this earlier in this thread)?
- how would you rather have it? Should we vote for our leaders?
I donāt want this to look like Iām provoking you with rhetorical questions (Iām not, I really think that these questions follow logically from the grievances and therefore are warranted), so here are my answers:
- No, Iād much rather hear their answers. Give it to me rude, give it to me fresh. I can take the information unpacked and naked and say thank you at the end. Remove the curt answers from this forum and youāll cut down the information value in this resource by half!
- No. That would waste a lot of time and wonāt necessarily make things better (we can talk more about this if you really feel strongly about democracy).
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Donāt know if I completely agree with this.
If you hire a software engineer, you donāt pick the smartest person. You pick the best person for the team.
Hackernews is full of articles that touch on this subject. And it becomes even more important when these developers are the public liasons of the language.
Comments like yours enforce this idea that being a good programmer allows you to be an ass 
Sorry, I didnāt mean to say that at all. All I was trying to say was, if I ask for help on a forum I, personally, am totally fine with getting an informative but curt reply. Iāll take help however I can get it. Put me on a team with people I need to collaborate with etc, then yea, there are a ton of other qualities that become important. But weāre not talking about that now, I think. Weāre only talking about point #1 in that list.
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Informative but curt is one think, unnecessarily rude is another. Disparaging other peopleās questions or ideas, as being āridiculousā or āabsurdā or āunreasonableā, for example.
Also, thereās a big problem when the rudeness comes from people with some power on the forum, who can also block or censor people they donāt agree with, viewpoints that they donāt want to be heard.
I believe that is why @juliohm is concerned about how those admin/moderation rights are granted.
The problem of a lack in manners doesnāt imply that the person actually does have a lot of knowledge or skill.
Many times people who are insecure about their own knowledge and skills denigrate and disparage people who disagree with them.
That behavior is indeed below an acceptable level. And as I mentioned before, we do need to be nice to each other, especially in such large forums. But the gray zone is huge here. Iāve followed the never-ending islower-lowercase-isupper-uppercase, and your own politeness was lacking at times too. Not in any major way, but you could have been slightly more polite. Just as the others could have been. My main point is that I think that no one has been overly rude without any repercussions, no matter what their role were. Or would you argue that people have been THAT impolite to warrant some retaliation and then didnāt get their due punishment because they were āabove the lawā?
So this here can only fall into one of these two bins:
- The moderators are a bunch of dictators abusing their powers to rule unjustly.
- The moderators are literally doing their job: moderate.
Which is it?
Iād like to just highlight my list from before. These are two different issues, and should be kept somewhat separate:
- The rudeness: some users with a lot of knowledge and skill are lacking in manners.
- The moderators: the way administration/moderation rights are granted is not democratic.
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Two people in particular have a long history of being rude and disparaging to other people, which has driven a number of people away from Julia. They also have a tendency to try to stifle/censor technical discussion they donāt agree with, and make false claims to āwinā what they view as an argument.
Now, here I believe you are getting offensive, by claiming that I was trying to say that.
Almost all of the moderators are fine (although it seems that frequently they donāt want to try to moderate a few who are unnecessarily rude to others, because of their power within the community).
Again, this implication that the ones who are being rude do have a lot of knowledge and skill, which doesnāt seem to be justified. The problem is when people are rude and disparaging to shut down other peopleās viewpoints, instead of trying to defend their own viewpoints on technical merit.
I see. OK, well I really donāt know enough about the specifics then. Tricky.
Sorry, I really didnāt mean to be so offensive, and agree that I was. Sorry about that. I guess what I wanted is some more clarity and resolve on what is what.
I have a strong feeling that what we all need is to spend a day or two together, talk things out, drink like 10 beers, shout and get it all out, and move on. Itāll be fine.
I know Iām looking forward to my share of beers this Xmas (Swedish style Xmas)!
IMO these very generic and vague discussions about āsome peopleā or āthe whole Discourse modelā are unlikely to achieve anything positive, and they may be actively harmful.
If people have grievances, they should provide specific details. Otherwise the members of the community are unable to judge the issue on their merits, and admins are unable to do anything about it even if they wanted to.
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I recently did - about a statement that was a total misrepresentation of the facts (along with a lot of documentation to prove it), only to have a moderator hide the message.
That censorship means the community is unable to judge the issue on merits, and instead only hears from the person with the power to block dissenting views.
If we like to speak about specific problems about lack of community respect - why to hide this message?
If people could flag messages and they will be hidden automatically this could potentially start some kind of battle for flag. I hope not.
If moderator keep that message hidden without any explanation then author probably could feel injustice. Some others could see (maybe falsely) mobbing techniques to wipe out opponent.
PS. About ādemocracyā - I probably share your opinion that it could not work better. Humans are complicated. 
But I am still thinking that this is good healthy forum! 
AFAICT āhiddenā messages can be clicked, opened, and read, and you can link to them. Again, if I wanted to learn about this case, I would have to guess, whereas you could just have linked it here.
Calling this feature of the site ācensorshipā dilutes the meaning of the word. Also, it is my impression that even this is used very sparingly.
Hiding a message like that creates the impression that the person actually did something to warrant it, besides disagreeing with a technical issue, or pointing out some misrepresentation, as I tried to with this message,
so that many people will not see it, and will end up with a negative impression of the author, without checking the facts for themselves.
I hadnāt ever used that feature before (just earned my Discourse āFirst Linkā badge!), Iāll do that in the future!
The issue I raised:
The moderators of this forum were not elected by the community. Therefore, they cannot represent all views and different opinions.
I am fighting for democracy, but the moderators are not. Please donāt get distracted with specifics, try to see the big picture. I will call what is happening the developer-moderator paradox:
I am a developer complaining that I donāt have time to code because of people on Discourse distracting me. On the other hand, I make myself a moderator of the forum, but I donāt have much time to listen to the community. Nevertheless, I have power to hide otherās comments and govern the forum the way I like.
The core Julia team is the same team moderating this forum, and is the same team working at JuliaComputing, and is the same, etc. etc. Why is that necessary? How diversity can take place?
Today I am reducing my participation on Discourse to a minimum because I strongly disagree with moderators opinions and their attitude against impolite comments, public embarrassment of new members and many other things. They do not represent me.
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Scott, If I had to guess, the reason that your post was hidden is that you misread a portion of Stefanās statement, and that set you off on a tangent. Here is what Stefan said, where Iāve added a couple of words to clarify how I interpret his statement.
Heās not disparaging the code that you wrote, heās pointing out real problems with the overall Strings architecture that were there even before you came on the scene.
Letās go on to the end of his message:
I see this as an entirely reasonable statement of the situation. I donāt see how Stefanās message as a whole can be interpreted as a personal attack, when he also goes out of his way to validate your perspective. When he says that āit can definitely be supported with packagesā, I take that to mean that the Julia community will work with you to address pain-points, to the best of its ability. Turn the conversation in that direction.
My advice to all-- read every message as if the author had good intent. Even if the comment is forceful (āThat argument is ridiculousā), donāt take it as a personal attack (āYou are ridiculousā-- quite different).
Best of luck in your encounters with surly Swedes 
. Today, I have to make the Jansonās Temptation, and keep my better half from tearing into all the Christmas gifts this afternoon instead of tomorrow morning, so I know what an uphill battle it can be.
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My point was that he was making a false statement, claiming that they had tried things āmyā way (basically blaming me for any problems he saw, which I can demonstrate were present in Julia long before I showed up).
That touches on my reputation, gained from long years being the principal architect at a company where string handling and performance where the main competitive advantages.
What I did was fix a LOT of bugs with string handling, greatly improved performance of conversions between different Unicode encodings, allowed the code to handle some of the most common variants of UTF-8 in the world (such as Java and others trick of using a long encoding for \0, i.e. \xc0\x80), and CESU-8, which has non-BMP characters encoded as 6-bytes, not 4 (i.e. a UTF-16 surrogate pair, encoded as 2 3-byte UTF-8 sequences).
Many people (including Jeff Bezanson) thanked me for that work.
He also greatly misrepresents what I am trying to do, and even the motivations for doing it.
Anyway, Iāll shortly have my Strs.jl package ready (maybe even a WIP version up as a Xmas 
morning present 
to the Julia community 
, hopefully with a finished, well-tested and benchmarked version by Jan. 6th, when the Reyes Magosā:prince:t2:
(i.e. the Three Wise Kings) arrive on their 
!
(side note: I wanted to get the Reyes Magos to be colored correctly but I couldnāt figure out how get the skin tones for them, they are supposed to be a redhead, a Moor (dark), and an Asian, according to Spanish tradition!)