Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

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In the history of SourceHut, only one person (setting aside spam/crypto-miner bots) has been banned from the platform. They were harassing maintainers and failed to respond to an email inquiry seeking to discuss their behavior before resorting to a ban.

I have strong principles and I stand steadfast by them. However, one of those principles is tolerance for different views. I want SourceHut to be available for everyone, even if we don't see eye-to-eye. You won't be booted off if you and I happen to end up in an argument somewhere online.

I've made myself personally available to users, as a person they can directly reach about problems and concerns with the services, rather than a support ticket answered by a random lackey. I think this is very valuable. Software is made by people. One of the risks that comes with this, however, is that people can start to view SourceHut and my private identity tangled together. Rest assured, they are separate, and I treat SourceHut with a great deal of deliberate professionalism and reverence for our users.

Wondering if SourceHut has a code of conduct, I found its Terms of Service > Permissible Use: https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use

Nicely done.

About banning... thinking out loud...

I wonder if a public ban log would reduce food fights. Nothing too fancy. Maybe just date, account name, cite terms violated, optionally cite evidence, admin actions taken. No need for comments, discussion, whatever.

Then whenever the peanut gallery starts concern trolling, you can just link to the ban log entry. Instead of explaining yourself, yet again.

Maybe. Even if someone is banned, I still care about their privacy, and I would not want to disclose that they were banned. Providing this information also provides useful feedback to malicious actors like spammers, who are ordinarily banned in a means which makes it difficult for them to tell when an account is burned.

SourceHut is not a social network and does not have particularly arduous moderation needs. It's vanishingly rare for us to ban someone at all for this reason. We additionally provide banned users with a complete data export and tools to re-import that data into other SourceHut instances or instances using compatible software, so they are not left without options.

If someone feels slighted by moderation on SourceHut, I would invite them to speak publicly about it. I'm prepared to justify our actions in the court of public opinion with consent from the maligned.

Well said.

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