> You are conflating several different groups of people. The PyPA are > the people who currently maintain the code for various > libraries/tools. That is very often not the same as the people who > originally wrote the code for the same libraries/tools or for > preceding ones. Neither group is the same as the forum moderators (I > suspect that there is no intersection between the moderators and the > PyPA etc.).
I'm sorry to tell you, but you suspect wrong. Unfortunately, it's always the same story. Whenever I or anyone else with a legitimate complaint about larger projects managed by PyPA tries to bring this to public discussion, they get banned and their comments about PyPA activity removed. It's always presented as if whoever is complaining is disrespecting the hard work of the person replying, who usually self-describe as selfless volunteer with limited time and attention they are willing to grant to the one complaining (implying they either are PyPA or are volunteering for them). As if their time was obviously more important than that was spent by the one complaining to research the problem and put together the complaint. This has nothing to do with the original authors of the projects managed by PyPA. I don't know why you decided to bring this up. I haven't mentioned them. > Actually you are wasting the time of others by putting across > inaccurate and unhelpful information in a rude way and at the same > time criticising others without really understanding who you are > criticising and for what. Your contribution is unhelpful mostly (but > not exclusively) because of the way that you choose to communicate. No, I'm not _wasting_ anyone's time. I bring up a legitimate issue that needs solving. What happens is a typical example of gatekeeping, overestimating one's worth or the value of one's contribution. The time I had to waste because of the bad decisions made by PyPA is orders of magnitude more than the time they have spent reading whatever I wrote to them. Point me to inaccurate information please. I'm happy to be corrected. Similarly, point me to where I was rude, and I will apologize. Apparently, I have a better understanding of who I criticize and for what than you do. You need to at least be factual when you make these sorts of claims. It's not for you to choose the way I communicate. There are accepted boundaries, and I'm well within those boundaries. Anything beyond that is not something I'm even interested in hearing your opinion on. > There is some significant irony in you describing the forum as a > "toxic pit" for deleting your posts. I don't always agree with the > moderators and I am not sure that I would have reacted the way that > they did but these threads remind me precisely why moderation > (including deleting posts such as yours) is needed to *prevent* a > forum from turning into a toxic pit. You, as well as the moderators of the toxic pit forum are confused about what it means to have a good discussion. The discussion that is currently happening around PyPA projects and ideas is broken because the PyPA side of the discussion is unwilling to acknowledge how bad they are at doing their job. Whenever any serious criticism of their work surfaces, they deal with it by deleting the criticism, never through addressing the problem. You can be the most polite and humble person in the world, but as soon as you bring up the subject of the quality of their decisions, you are automatically excluded from discussion. The only criticism anyone is allowed to have is the kind that doesn't touch on any major projects. It's possible to point out typos in documentation or to address similarly inconsequential defects at the smaller code unit level, but it's not possible to call for a revision of ideas behind libraries or PEPs. For instance, as soon as you mention the comically awful idea of pyproject.toml in a bad light, you get a ban. I believe this comes from the place of insecurity in one's ideas, and has nothing to do with how polite the criticism is. And that's when instruments like "code of conduct" are called upon to delete the inconvenient criticism. This is what creates toxic communities like StackOverflow or similarly built social networks which endow their moderators with way too much power over other users. The other extreme of anarchy, similar to 4chan, doesn't suffer from this problem, but sometimes results in grotesque gore or other _unpleasant_ things but aren't toxic in the same way gatekeeping is. This is how I understand and use the word "toxic". The dicuss.python.org is just as toxic as StackOverflow -- I don't have a metric precise enough to tell who's worse. I believe that this format is a very unfortunate choice for public discussion where there isn't an inherent division between owners and non-owners. Where giving the keys to the common good to a small group of people creates such a division. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
