@glyph oh sure. but as you describe, the thing they were *doing* was still "constantly testing the rules", which imo is in itself extremely actionable. even if you want to exclude outside behavior, it's not like you forget everything they've already done *in the space*
@glyph having a bunch of people call me a pedophile — an assertion that cannot be disproven and a lens through which a bunch of my actions were reinterpreted — has left me with something of a distaste for label-based moderation
@eevee yeah, and even in less extreme cases, this type of approach presents some pretty terrible incentives. wreckers will start trying to label everyone they even mildly dislike. Read Some Theory jerks will label every moderate who doesn't have time to develop their own unique synthesis of Kropotkin and Marx as an enthusiastic genocidal fascist. arguments which SHOULD be about behavior instead center on ideology
@eevee the problem with trying to penalize "constantly testing the rules" is that it is _very_ easy to muddy the waters and do a bunch of stuff that massively stresses everyone out and is kind of awful but is hard to overtly prove is a transgression. something like the Olivia Hill rule is probably the best way to break this logjam but socializing that requires a surprising amount of effort
@glyph if you're massively stressing everyone out then you probably shouldn't be in the space!
@eevee (cue a lengthy complaint about how that's just, like, your opinion, and doesn't everyone have the RIGHT to be in the space, it's not like I BROKE any RULES, etc etc etc. and yeah the immune system of the space needs to have a way to recognize this)
@glyph rule zero: don't make me moderate you
@glyph @daedalus @eevee re: open source, i was kind of surprised to learn that pro-"benevolent dictator for life" stuff is still being seriously espoused today. i just assumed that people had realized why Having A Guy does not solve the whole governance thing ( and may in fact be quite problematic!) and re moderation, like sure "dont make me moderate you"/"dont be a dick" is a good starting point but if "dont be a dick" was easy to derive for the purpose of determining what actionable steps to take on the scale of a community of hundreds or thousands , we wouldn't have any work to do, right? but clearly (gestures vaguely at everything) we do
@silverstar @eevee I am rarely the unilateral moderator in the unpleasant situations I have seen. Honestly rarely a moderator at all, usually in some kind of advisory capacity. the problem is not explaining to the problematic person, but the stress involved in getting a diverse moderation team on board with this type of orientation. I suspect it would be easier nowadays, but certainly in our collective resist-lib era it was challenging to explain this