Re: [bitcoin-dev] 1 Year bitcoin-dev Moderation Review

[Henning Kopp <henning.kopp@uni-ulm.de>]

Hi all,

I totally agree with the assessment of the situation. Previously I
learned a lot about bitcoin on this list. There were a lot of great
ideas regarding the protocol and the surrounding ecosystem. Now there
is mainly talk about code and BIPs, which is the main purpose of a
developer list.
I do not feel that we should clog bitcoin-dev again with
non-development talk but rather find a way to get bitcoin-discuss
going. My impression is that bitcoin-discuss has not reached a
critical mass of contributors. The question is how we can change that.

All the best
Henning

On Sun, Oct 09, 2016 at 12:26:07PM +0200, Jeremy via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hi bitcoin-dev,
> 
> I'm well aware that discussion of moderation on bitcoin-dev is
> discouraged*. However, I think that we should, as a year of moderation
> approaches, discuss openly as a community what the impact of such policy
> has been. Making such a post now is timely given that people will have the
> opportunity to discuss in-person as well as online as Scaling Bitcoin is
> currently underway. On the suggestion of others, I've also CC'd
> bitcoin-discuss on this message.
> 
> Below, I'll share some of my own personal thoughts as a starter, but would
> love to hear others feelings as well.
> 
> For me, the bitcoin-dev mailing list was a place where I started
> frequenting to learn a lot about bitcoin and the development process and
> interact with the community. Since moderation has begun, it seems that the
> messages/day has dropped drastically. This may be a nice outcome overall
> for our sanity, but I think that it has on the whole made the community
> less accessible. I've heard from people (a > 1 number, myself included)
> that they now self-censor because they think they will put a lot of work
> into their email only for it to get moderated away as trolling/spam. Thus,
> while we may not observe a high rate of moderated posts, it does mean the
> "chilling effect" of moderation still manifests -- I think that people not
> writing emails because they think it may be moderated reduces the rate of
> people writing emails which is a generally valuable thing as it offers
> people a vehicle through which they try to think through and communicate
> their ideas in detail.
> 
> Overall, I think that at the time that moderation was added to the list, it
> was probably the right thing to do. We're in a different place as a
> community now, so I feel we should attempt to open up this valuable
> communication channel once again. My sentiment is that we enacted
> moderation to protect a resource that we all felt was valuable, but in the
> process, the value of the list was damaged, but not irreparably so.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
> * From the email introducing the bitcoin-dev moderation policy, "Generally
> discouraged: shower thoughts, wild speculation, jokes, +1s, non-technical
> bitcoin issues, rehashing settled topics without new data, moderation
>  concerns."
> 
> 
> --
> @JeremyRubin <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
> <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>

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-- 
Henning Kopp
Institute of Distributed Systems
Ulm University, Germany

Office: O27 - 3402
Phone: +49 731 50-24138
Web: http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/vs/~kopp