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

[Jeremy <jlrubin@mit.edu>]

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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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