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I had the same initial reaction as you but actually think that in such situations asking people not to interact with the members of the organization is appropri
by deredede 4y ago
I had the same initial reaction as you but actually think that in such situations asking people not to interact with the members of the organization is appropriate. Sometimes people do need to be put in timeout, and I read this as a formal way of requesting the problematic user stays away from the community for a bit.
Private interactions with members of the community, as well as interactions in other contexts (eg working on a different project), I would assume to be fine. They don't want the problematic member to be harassing other members through unofficial channels, and the only consequence would be not being re-integrated in the community.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoI mean, harassment is already against the Twitter ToS. I'm not sure of any social media site where it isn't. At some point, you have to assume that if a member doesn't want to be contacted, they're their own person enough to communicate that. Anyway, I understand why Mozilla would want to make a declaration like this. I just think the fact that they believed that this was a declaration that they could make, and have be obeyed, reveals an uncomfortable sentiment of social ownership.
- danielheath 4y agoI mean... it's not a question of "I declared it, so you will do it". It's a question of "You broke the rules once; you can stay in timeout for a week or we can ban you entirely". Would you be bothered if they'd skipped the first part and just banned them from their gruop for making trouble?
- FeepingCreature 4y agoI am fine with any judgment Mozilla make on infrastructure that they run and that belongs directly to the project, such as mailing lists, official chatrooms, etc. It's the addition of "unofficial" social platforms that irks me; it seems totalitarizing. Interaction of contributors outside the project ecosystem is none of their business. I prefer for society to be sliced "horizontally", rather than "vertically". I am not aware of good terms for that. I want the arrangement to be that people can spend some of their time contributing to some group effort, with no impact on other efforts; rather than that people belong to groups, totally: "I contribute to Thunderbird" vs. "I am a Thunderbird developer." The resigning of Brendan Eich violated that same rule as well. You work for Mozilla, then you go home and Mozilla drops out of your life. You are not a Mozilla employee unless you're on the clock. Only, what happened was that it turns out you can't be a Mozilla employee and a certain kind of Republican in the same person; the vertical isolation was violated. I think this is because people saw Brendan as "he is a Mozilla employee" rather than "he works at Mozilla." I am against that way of looking at people. I think it is important for the functioning of society that people can horizontally intermix rather than segregate. A core part of the horizontal arrangement of society is that when you leave the boundary of a project, you leave its mores behind you; you are allowed to codeswitch as you context switch. Any rule that penalizes you for behavior elsewhere that violates the local rules directly threatens this.
- danielheath 4y agoI think I understand you, and I think I broadly agree, but in this case the restriction was specifically on contacting other thunderbird members; that seems like it's clearly still a vertical slice to me.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoI think what makes it horizontal for me is that you can't "go home and stop being a Thunderbird member". A "Thunderbird member" is something you are, rather than something you do. So this effectively asserts project ownership over the person. This is why I don't care what they do on project media like ML. That's a social space that's reserved for the project itself, so fair's fair. It's part of their slice, but "Twitter, Facebook and Telegram" is not. It's like a school deciding that a child is a bad influence and isn't allowed to have a sleepover with another child in the same class. You have authority over them as long as they're in your care, and not one second longer.
- tomrod 4y ago> "go home and stop being a Thunderbird member" That's what being banned by an organization is. If it feels similar to a cult, it's because cults are organizations too (I say this as a former cult member from birth who was shunned for leaving). Regardless of the merits of the organization, there aren't other effective ways to guide acceptable behavior by its acolytes -- even criminal punishment by governments (organizations) is a related act.