With over 100,000 users and over 20,000 members among the Facebook group, Community Forum, GitHub issue tracker, and other VCV communities, it is a good time to adopt a code of conduct which defines acceptable communication between members.
The Contributer Covenant is an extremely reasonable set of guidelines used in many open-source projects, so all communities moderated by VCV will now adopt these guidelines, not just for “code contributers” but for all members of the user groups. This will promote positivity and professionalism when participating in discussions about VCV Rack.
I’d like to see a project maintainer’s/moderator’s code of conduct as well.
There have been multiple instances in the last 18 months of comment deletion where the comments disagree with the VCV maintainers’ stance, under the guise of comment “quality” not meeting certain arbitrary standards.
With a contributor’s code, but not a (publicly visible) maintainer’s/moderator’s code as a counterbalance, there exists a large imbalance of power which can be used to silence specific persons, as well as dissenting viewpoints.
“Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project’s leadership.”
I’d say that it’s not in good faith to be moderating with bias/without transparency.
I mean, obviously, if Andrew were to start spewing epithets, or otherwise directly breaking those rules, then yeah, that clause would hold to be sufficient.
But to deem comments which disagree with him to “not bring anything to the conversation” and delete them for “readability”, when he hasn’t told anyone that a certain level of technical knowledge/proficiency/language is required to participate in a conversation (I’m referencing Github issue 1292 where I and a developer at the least had dissenting comments deleted - check Facebook for the receipts), is totally poor form and not acting in good faith.
Not to mention that a policy of deleting comments for “readability” brings up many potential issues in and of itself. If someone posts in African American Vernacular English/Newfie English/language creoles etc, or doesn’t have proper wording because they’re not a native English speaker, or has lots of spelling mistakes because of dyslexia/learning disabilities, or the like, are those going to be moderated away for “readability”?
(And I’m not referring to “first”, “same”, or other one-word responses).
He’s assuming/incorrectly inferring that my issue is over the use of the word “yeet”.
My issue is his condescension, and his biased attitude that comments that don’t meet certain requirements “bring nothing to the conversation”. Deletion of comments that don’t break the rules (and per another thread on that FB post, 18+ language is ok), and are at least a few words long, should not be occurring, and especially not after being replied to with a condescending “please improve the quality of your posts before participating in Github Issues”.
well, they were addressed (barely) in the linked FB thread, and I’m not going to see any resolution to that specifically.
But at the same time, The questions I asked are still valid.
So are concerns over (what can be boiled down to) condescension and elitism - whether intentional or otherwise - on the part of our “benevolent dictator”.
We came close to losing plugin developers in the lead up to v1.0, solely over the issue of the condescension. While the stats show the userbase only growing, we do also lose users from the communities because of it.
It’s not JUST me who feels this way. I’m just the squeaky wheel who dares to question the powers of the all-powerful, because I’ve nothing else to lose really.
Whatever Andrew is going to say and decide there will be a few people that disagree. This is just normal and how things are, you can’t make everyone happy. And it has nothing to do with VCV or Andrew Belt.
I’m not taking any “sides” here and I can’t (and won’t) follow that discussion referenced on Facebook because I’m not on Facebook. Just my opinion in general about open platforms.
VCVRack is not for everyone and everyone can’t be pleased all at the same time.
Sounds like you are questioning it just because. I think you are overthinking it to be honest.
We are all in the community because we want to be part of it, if there needs to be some guidelines in place to protect the community so be it.
In what way would you personally word such guidelines?
Considering how the license change thread was posed as an RFC even though the decision was already made and no attempts at actually reaching a wider audience was made to evaluate it, can you really be surprised that moderation is turning in to a similar tire fire?
Very intelligent people can disagree with one another, and indeed it is good when they do (Edison & Tesla before they split, Steve Jobs had people who disagreed with him regularly in his small councils.) Opposing friction means people actually care about something. People who can’t survive dissent are statistically more often weak than unrivaled geniuses.
Lets just call that a bad example. Edison hired Tesla to fix his DC generators then refused to pay him then successfully discredited him more than once and made it extremely hard for him to get Patents, but he still used his AC theories in his DC generators. I would not call that a disagreement!
After reading a few of these comments, here are a couple things to clear up confusion:
The purpose of the code of conduct is to create a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of identity. It has nothing to do with creating a complete set of rules for people to test and bend by making posts with poor taste. VCV offers these communities to members as a privilege for discussing VCV Rack, and admins/moderators can make a decision to remove you at any time if you abuse this privilege, often with warnings as a courtesy. If you are positive member of the VCV community, you are always welcome here.
If you see a post that you think violates the code of conduct, report it. I don’t read all posts in the VCV communities, but reported posts will be reviewed by admins/moderators and handled accordingly.
You all have valid arguments here, but honestly this new code of conduct doesn’t change much (still good to have it imo) There were already forums rules before that i remember reading on signup that are really similar to this new code.
Also, i trust the mods from here, i’m sure Nik, Omri or Immortaljellyfish would not “censor” just because we would disagree over smtg…
Just like @Vortico just said, they will handle reported post that violate the code of conduct (that again, was already kind of in place).
We shouldn’t see this as " hey your liberty of speech is gone ". I’m sure it’s not at all the case
There’s a difference between being pleased/not, and being allowed to voice one’s displeasure.
Obviously not, just like cilantro, pine nuts, and sushi aren’t for everyone. But we’re not talking just about Rack, we’re also talking about Rack’s COMMUNITIES.
The issue that I’m raising is that the actions and attitude of one singular person (who happens to be in charge of everything) are running counter to both principles set forth by the code of conduct, as well as common markers of community building, AND good faith practices of moderation.
(still good to have it imo) There were already forums rules before that i remember reading on signup that are really similar to this new code.