I'd like to echo/reinforce Adam's conclusion:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 7:39 PM, Adam Wight awight@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you for your energy and insights, and I hope we can work together to root out the bad decisions and corruption, without this nonsense of having to bail you out of Phabricator jail every few months.
FWIW, I value the "loyal opposition" in open source projects as a healthy counterweight. I have worked with other open source projects in the past where the "loyal opposition" proved to outlast the original project in dedication to the shared cause.
I also care deeply about preventing harassment of our community. It is a hard line to draw beween "difficult truths" and "deliberately hurtful". "Assume good faith" is our mantra to try to concentrate on the "truth" instead of the "difficult" part, but it's a never-ending challenge to get the balance right.
MZ is a canary in our coal mine, in two ways. On one hand MZ continually challenges us to revisit our assumptions and do better in our work. This is hard but terribly useful.
On the other hand, MZ tests and probes our community guidelines. We need to ensure they are well calibrated to protect the community from harm. And I'm not going to minimize the harm that careless criticism can do, especially to new contributors or soft voices. I don't think a temporary ban in this case is outrageous (although I echo Chad's concern), and I don't think that close scrutiny of MZ's words is unreasonable. I think there are many measures we can take to listen carefully to MZ without allowing MZ's actions to effect harm, and we should continue to do them.
I hope that we will continue to do the difficult balancing work, and not fall into the easy extremes. We must not ignore difficult truths, though it is easy to do so if the messenger is unappealing. But we also must not assume that because the criticism is legit the presentation is ipso facto acceptable. --scott, speaking for myself only