But I have been monitoring it, just now it has been locked, so that no one is able to comment, and it falls off the radar and silences an open discussion - I have never ever seen a thread get locked on EdgeRyders, from my perspective this looks like censorship. In the context of an appointment of someone to the company that controls the EdgeRyders platform this is deeply inappropriate and a misuse of technical admin rights.
I request that the thread is unlocked, and ER LBG ceases to use it’s technical admin rights to stifle discussion that it doesn’t like.
From the perspective of a participant in the discussion
It didn’t feel good to be locked out of the discussion like that.
Especially as there are many other threads which clog up email inboxes - in the dev group discussion which @Nadia mentions in her comment, I had been talking specifically about the ‘Open Call’ blogpost comments. Those comments weren’t closed to avoid filling people’s inboxes, but this discussion was? I don’t know the thought process behind the decision but it doesn’t project a good image. It looks like ER LBG is shutting down comments to stop an embarrassing conversation spreading to too many of the ER community members.
The decision may indeed be totally innocent, it may be purely coincidental that this thread was the first to be locked, and that’s fine if so. But there is no avoiding the fact that it looks bad.
As a participant in the discussion, I also didn’t appreciate the thread being closed very shortly after @Alberto had misunderstood/misrepresented my position, leaving me with no opportunity to refute or explain what I actually meant, outside of starting a completely new thread which many people will not read.
…writing. Did not see your comment before posting below. I am sorry if you felt this way, I interpreted part of your comment as a reminder of the problem with the notifications and acted accordingly.
Had read this bit which is why I reacted to this thread (in the blog group) and not others: “I follow the Blog group because I want to be kept up-to-date on what’s going on, but often there are discussions which bear no relevance to me - ideally I would get the notification alerting me to the new blog post, I could read it, and then if I decide I don’t want/need to be notified of every comment on that particular blog entry, I could ‘unsubscribe from post’ without turning off my subscription to the Blog group in general.”"
In an open community that’s focused on honest open discussion, however difficult and conflictual, I’d advise that before taking unilateral action based on your own perspective and unique technical rights that you at very least poll those taking part in the discussion whether it would be more productive to move the thread. It’s fairly unlikely that a discussion that relates directly to the governance of the overall community is something that belongs in the ‘spam’ box.
Very disappointing behaviour that only reads as a continued escaluation of ER LBG’s attempt to lock down their controlling stake in the ER community.
The thread is available and linked to on the page itself and in several places here. You are of course free to choose your own interpretation of anyone’s behaviour at any time. Whether or not your interpretation is accurate is likewise for others to make their own decisions about.
@Nadia, I know you’re focussing on the ‘technical reasons’ in this discussion, but please answer this question directly:
For other community members of Edgeryders, what do you think the perception of closing the comments on that thread would be? Do you not see it as problematic?
Do you really think that the positive aspect of ‘fewer unnecessary notifications’ is worth the negative aspect of lack of trust that stems from a perception of Edgeryders LBG censoring or hiding critical discussions?
As someone on the organisation legally responsible for ensuring no one is harassed I looked in after what felt like a few minutes and saw the conversation was rapidly derailing both in tone and content so I made a judgement call. The thread itself contains an important discussion which I think it is important to have in the open. However, the discussion is embedded in a hostile exchange which contains personal attacks and insults, something to which no one should be subjected on the platform. This goes both for individual in the conversation as well as others receiving notifications from it that they cannot unsubscribe to at the moment.
I am sorry you interpret this as malicious or an attempt to stop a conversation- I see it as a compromise that would allow the unpleasant but necessary conversation to continue without censorship for those who want to engage in it, while sparing everyone who does not want to be subjected to personal insults and slurs. As well as giving everyone time to cool off enough to at least get the name of the person they are addressing right.
‘I’m sorry you interpret this as malicious or an attempt to stop a conversation’
I don’t interpret it as malicious, I interpret it as short-sighted and reckless, with very little thought put into what effect such an action has on the reputation of Edgeryders LBG.
The idea that you would not check the timestamp of comments to get an understanding of how a conversation has developed over time before making such an unprecedented call seems a particularly hasty approach.
‘I see it as a compromise that would allow the unpleasant but necessary conversation to continue’
I did not find my discussion with Alberto unpleasant, and both Patrick and Arthur had not been engaged in the thread for a long time.
‘As well as giving everyone time to cool off enough to at least get the name of the person they are addressing right.’
This makes no sense. Is this referring to katalin calling Patrick Andrews ‘Andrew’? This is clearly a simple and very understandable mistake, not a frazzled error of someone frothy-mouthed with rage. There is nothing, nothing in her comments or tone which could be seen as an insult or an attack against Patrick. As I see it, in the same spirit as my comment, she wanted to draw attention to the sensitive situation between ER and ER LBG.
The last two comments that may be interpreted as ‘attacks’ would be Patrick’s ‘Bad Blood’ (21 hours ago) and ArthurD’s ‘Incompetence…’ (22 hours ago). Since then all discussions on the thread have been perfectly level-headed and completely in accordance with the ER code of conduct.
This is the weekend before a holiday. And yet our obligations remain. I would much rather weather the storm of some members of the community perceiving me to have acted in a way that is less than ideal than to risk having people being subjected to personal attacks again. When things move very quickly, too quickly, for people to stop and really reflect before they post this is likely to happen over and over in infected discussions. This is psychologically quite heavy and I need to check that we are living up to our obligations. A slew of exchanges (and notifications) just speeds these dynamics up so we don’t have time to do that check and have to use personal judgement. If we were more community managers working on the platform that would take preassure off the small number of people. But this and many other issues mentioned here and elsewhere I think is something we can discuss with a view to moving forward through a structured, well-facilitated process where everyone can be heard such as the one suggested by Caroline. Like this it is just a lot of different opinions with one or two people having to both respond to a lot of questions and asses different options in real time, while managing you know, a life.
So I am requiring everyone who expressed desire to have the post unlocked to accept the rules of engagement, both as participant and co-moderator.
Ah, it was me. I mixed up Patrick’s first and last name in my comment last night - but that can be hardly the reason to close down the thread today afternoon. I would happily correct it if my comment (which had zero personal attack in it) was editable.
yes, but as I pointed out, the ‘Open Call’ post in the Blog group which I was referring to directly, is an entirely innocuous discussion and is still open for comments today. In that dev discussion we talked about various workarounds and I said I could solve the problem with email filters. No need to stop the ongoing conversation to make an unrelated person slightly more comfortable.
Stopping (or at least severely hindering) an active discussion in the name of ‘avoiding spam for non-participants’ seems like a very drastic, illogical step. I understand that in this case it may have just been poor judgement, but it looks bad.
I was able to find a workaround, so that now Sam’s continuation post is directly linked from Nadia’s final comment.
Actually, there is a precedent for unpublishing a post and kicking someone off platform (Elf telling everyone to F**k off, in a sort of playful-aggressive way). In this case, there was ample basis to invoke ad hominem and do the same. But, as I tried to explain in a comment to Sam’s post, it would have looked bad. So, it was either migrate or spam everybody. Given that, since publishing, Patrick’s post has received all of 48 visits (of which about 5 are from me), I guess the interest in following it is not that great.
@SamMuirhead, would it help if I took down my last comment and moved it into the discussion you started?
No, that wouldn’t help. It would help if you took our two comments from the new thread and added them to the original thread, so that the conversation is complete and in context - I think I understand your position now, I don’t entirely agree with it, but I don’t think I have anything more constructive to add so I’ll leave it at that.
What I disagree with very strongly is closing the comments on the original thread.
Unlike posts, comments can’t be moved. You can edit them or delete them, you can copy their content into new comments, but you cannot associate them to different posts in the database. If you authorize me, I could try (I have never done it before) to do the following:
Copy your "continuation" post into a comment to the main post. I think I can find a way to attribute it to your user rather than to mine.
Copy my comment to your post into a new comment to your comment, attributed to me. That's easy.
Ask Nadia to re-open the main post, with a warning to everyone to stay level-headed.
Just so I can clarify the situation that you are standing by @alberto.
There has never previously been an instance in which a post has been locked.
The post in question concerns discussion that relates to the appointment and resulting conflict of an exec to ER LBG.
Those who hold technical admin rights have decided unilaterally that this post is causing too much spam, so it must be locked and moved, because the quality and importance of such a discussion amounts only to that of spam.
The post in question under no circumstance will be unlocked, because @alberto and @nadia think this is the best way to proceed.
End of story?
Could I also just check, going forward will other threads also be locked as and when they are deemed to be spam? What is the procedure for this? Can anyone in the community signal when they’re being spammed and also see that thread moved?
There are a few threads I can think of that are likely candidates for this. For instance the election of the non-exec thread has been causing all kinds of issues and points of conflicts, could I suggest that this is also moved to spam?