Hey there -- >>> On Sep 20, 2019, at 01:25, Brent <bre...@stitcher.io> wrote: >>> >>> Moderators are no dictators >> >> Maybe, maybe not. >> >> But moderators can and do play favorites, banning or silencing one voice (of >> whom they disapprove) for the same things that they ignore from another >> voice (of whom they do approve). > > I feel like internals@ members have very little trust in their peers
Perhaps; trust can be hard to come by. > and fear the world will burn and PHP will die because of moderators who try > to keep the discussions ontopic and civil. I think the fear is not of "the world burning" but of "being silenced." Further, "on-topic" is in the eye of the beholder; once there are moderators, their eyes are the only ones that matter. > Say five moderators are appointed and one turns out to be a bad one, a > dictator, a villain; We need not presume a villain or dictator. We need presume only groupthink -- a groupthink that biases moderator actions to err always on the same side (that is, the side populated by voices the moderators approve of). > the other four *and* the community at large can simply dismiss that bad one. Ah, if only that were true. No, moderators have the power to act immediately, whereas any oversight regarding them can act only slowly, with deliberation, after long latency -- and even *then* only after long discussion, which the moderators themselves control. No, there is no way to "simply" dismiss a moderator. >> Moderators, with the power to ban and to silence, become the owners of the >> project whose communications they moderate. By controlling the flow of >> information in a project, moderators control the status of the members in >> that project, and thereby control the direction of the project. > > I've been part of numerous online communities over the years, and this has > never, ever, been a problem anywhere. I've been a part of numerous online communities as well, and I have found it to be a problem quite often -- especially at the point of introduction of moderators. > Now PHP and internals@ might be the exception, though I think a little common > sense and human decency will get us a long way and might even make internals@ > productive again. I think there is quite a bit of "common sense and human decency" in play here already, even if not universal and uninterrupted -- nobody on this list is an angel, though some are more devilish than others. -- Paul M. Jones pmjo...@pmjones.io http://paul-m-jones.com Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP https://leanpub.com/mlaphp Solving the N+1 Problem in PHP https://leanpub.com/sn1php -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
