drake

The issue here is that when there are new people, they will remove freedom of speech on meta, and do the exact same thing. It is extremely difficult to set a precedent for free speech. At the same time, I do not wish Dilaton problems. The site is a tremendous achievement, and if it fulfils its mission, it is a great feather in Dilaton's cap, no matter if Dilaton is moderating or standing on the sidelines watching and participating. If there were clear accountability rules established, that would be best. It is paramount to decrease the power of moderators as much as possible, and have user oversight.

Hi drake, I've replied to your private message (which I didn't receive an email notification for, due to problems with the mailing server or something). Writing this here because I'm afraid the email notification might not be sent for you either.

Who exactly has "left"?

I doubt anyone with an interest in teaching and helping their graduate students has left. At the very least, they're hovering in the background.

I will leave too if Dilaton doesn't step down in a reasonable time frame. Dilaton also does things that are more subtle, like asking members to vote on political motions, something which I never did (until inviting Eduardo to vote on the recent stuff, for obvious reasons--- there's no one else to do so). I wrote and forced through the user rights against Dilaton's wishes, it will get removed. This is like "Animal Farm", I can't stand it, really. If you think you have a headache, think about what I had to go through arguing about this for 7 months.

You don't need to be moderator to get the policies through, you need to be there to be an adult countering Dilaton's constant political emails. Dilaton builds consensus through repetition of points in email, brainwashing the young ones. You are immune, I am less so, so I have to cuss and such to get rid of the demons in my head. I just want an adult non-scheming moderator. I think Jia is a student. Dilaton needs to step down, and if it's you, Jia, and Dim10, then I can feel safe. And the email group-consensus politics has to be public. Jia already is staying neutral on all these threads, and there is nobody else here, they all left.

The reason for "kid talk" is because the only two humans I have been interacting with for the past year are Dimension10 and my 5 year old daughter, both of whom have a roughly equal understanding of abuse of power. I guess the speech style is affected by this. I reverted when you got all "adult" on me. I am really sorry about that, it wasn't intentional.

Dilaton from the beginning philosophically believed that some people are trolls who are not serious or honest, and that serious people need to be protected from these trolls. I argued against this position for 7 months, but nothing, no change, and I got a sinking feeling. Then the harassment started, I got the hell away from here, then Dilaton started doing bad things and got rid of VK, and I came back and undid the damage. Dilaton feels guilty about it only because of the damage to the site. We always discussed rotating modship, and it might come to pass in the end, if the modship rotates away all the time, this can't happen again. But it's very difficult to live with this uncertainty, because if Dilaton starts to make friends and do politics with naive young people, anything can happen, as Dilaton can get people to think all sorts of things using loaded words. For the past 6 months I've had to hear how I am a dictator (Napoleon Ron-aparte in Dimension10's phrase). The whole reason for me to join this site and help with the set up was to make sure this kind of administrative problem would never, ever, happen. I can't fork it, though, not at this point, because the principles in the actual rules are certainly enough to prevent abuse, unless there is more serious abuse in the future. To see that, it helps to look from the point of view of a user, so I'm a user now. You can expose the bad stuff even if you are not an admin, as you have the right to complain on meta. But if Dilaton stays as the only permanent moderator, Dilaton will be the real dictator, and this site is totally cooked.

Dimension10 is honest, and well-meaning, just young. He is doing his best.

The problem is that we had no accountability rules to start with, so we don't know what to do now. If you make the rules now, you can't apply them retroactively, so Dilaton would still stay on. This is why I went the roundabout way.

I tried to get Dilaton to step down in every way I could think of. I asked for "no anonymous moderators" (that means Dilaton steps down), I asked you to change your question to "Moderator review: Dilaton" and then put three answers "Dilaton should stay on as moderator" "Dilaton should step down as moderator" "Other ideas". For sure, "Dilaton should step down as moderator" would win the vote. But you didn't make a clean vote, and that's why I made negative comments. I also don't get why you are hostile to me. I exposed the thing, and did my utmost to fix it, and I agree with you on everything.

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