Drift, or creep, happens to governance systems over time. Their original goals can even got lost, or actively opposed, over time. This is especially so in systems insulated from feedback from the governed. Then internal echo chambers intensify the process, with internal players seeming, at times, to egg each other on in a race to the bottom.

Drift is incremental, and not always monotonic. And sometimes it’s “secret”, not visible to the public.

Following are some examples. It will probably grow over time. Here are links to more recent entries:

Early but telling drift

One of the first visible actions in the “brave new CoC” era was blocking an unpopular person on GitHub. They posted mildly annoying outlines filled with links to pages they presumably found interesting. They never bothered anyone beyond this. But rather than serve the original stated goal of fostering a welcoming community, the CoC was employed as a bludgeon to drive someone out. And a person who was quite possibly of a class more recent CoCs 1 recognize as worthy of protection (neurodivergent - posting lists of links appeared to be their only communication style, in or out of “PSF spaces”).

For more:

Mission creep

The PSF’s code of conduct is very legalistic in tone, with a relatively massive section on “Scope”. It, e.g., takes pains to point out that even hallways in conference venues are subject to CoC enforcement. Well, duh :wink:. But it seems to be very explicit overall that only official “PSF spaces” and only spokespeople acting on behalf of the PSF are covered.

And a good piece from a long-time CoC WG member seems to acknowledge this:

What you do in your life outside of Python is none of the WG’s concern,

But that’s not really a recognized constraint:

but if you, e,g., call out your PSF affiliation on your profile on X and then post something that goes against the CoC, then that’s a problem as that then reflects poorly on the PSF and the rest of the membership.

I see nothing in the actual CoC that can be read that way. Can you? I’m not a lawyer. I don’t recall whether I ever said on my blog whether or not I’m a PSF member, but it’s not a secret that I am (I’m a long-time Fellow, in fact). Does saying that out loud now make my blog subject to PSF censorship? We’ll see.

And it may not end even there:

Now, if someone were to very publicly come out as a member of some heinous organization even without talking about Python then that might be enough to warrant the Conduct WG saying something to the PSF board (and this probably applies more to Fellows than general members), but I haven’t seen that happen.

Like bureaucracies everywhere, they don’t actually recognize limits on the power they “should” have to control.

Drift to indulge personal pecadillos

This can also be seen as how well-intended overreach can backfire, causing more pain than it could spare.

I’ve mentioned briefly on d.p.o. that a woman contacted me (in December of 2024) to relate her tale of d.p.o. moderation pain. I say “a woman” because that was a demographic marker for people the CoC especially intended to make welcome. Otherwise I wouldn’t care.

She doesn’t post broadly, but appears to be highly respected for careful, informed posts (she has a doctorate in her field, and obviously puts real thought into her posts).

I have her permission to use her name (she’s brave!), and screenshots of all the mod interactions she had, but I don’t think those necessary to make the point. I don’t care about “assigning blame”. I care about toxic processes.

She posted a message containing

I can’t make sense of “keep it mostly the same but harm user experience”.

Looks ordinary to me. But a mod insisted that the word “harm” was “unnecessarily negative”, and wouldn’t budge. Seems at the very worst a micro-aggression, but I can’t stretch it even that far. It’s common wording in the computer world to invoke an image of harm. Start with Dijkstra’s famous “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”. What - well - harm did the mod imagine her word might cause?

It certainly caused her pain to be read in the worst possible imaginable light. She felt the opposite of “welcome”. In her words:

More importantly though, I think that by intentionally reading the worst possible intent, one that requires adding words I did not include, is highly inappropriate for a moderator to be doing and in the context of everything else I’ve seen, and I’m sure many things I have not, that this is indicative of a hurtling towards a metaphorical cliff. At some point if this continues, it will zffect enough of the people who are less stubborn in pushing back, and who instead just leave (we know many of those have happened already, but how many left or will leave silently?) and I think python will be worse for that.

Indeed, the people who leave remain invisible forever more.

And the final insult: her “trust level” on Discourse was reduced from level 3 to level 2 as a result. What kind of petty torment is that?! Going on a year now, I see it’s still at level 2. BTW, she did reword the post.

Inward drift

Over time, an enforcement body drifts into viewing itself as “the community” it’s supposedly protecting, and increasingly views questioning of its own actions as threats to the actual community. This reached a North Korean level of bizarreness in one of the “CoC violations” David Mertz was charged with when he was “indefinitely suspended” from Discourse (and, if anything, the charges against him were even less founded than the ones against me)

Source

  • Gracefully accepting constructive criticism, violating this in particular byin [sic] explicit voicing of a lack of trust against moderator actions like his posts getting hidden and aas well as lack of trust in the current state of the Code of Conduct and the COC WG;

Does this really need to be spelled out? There is no possible “constructive criticism” given by hiding a post, and questioning am enforcement body is only a chargeable offense if you question an authoritarian dictator. Not to mention that it vastly overstates what David did: he was visibly angry at a mod for making material edits to his posts (which they agreed to stop doing).

That’s hardly unique. One of the most frequent frustrations I hear is from people baffled by inconsistent treatment of various people. People praising the PSF do seem to get a lot more slack than people questioning it 2. And I’ve noted for years that when there’s some plausible “political” slant to a disastrous thread that gets someone suspended, the excesses of the “left wing” side are overlooked. Which sometimes works to my favor, although I wish it wouldn’t (for example, I strongly condemned the Trump administration’s ICE actions preceding PyCon 2025). That is, political speech is actually welcome - but provided it’s echoing the PSF power players’ politics. There’s little tolerance of political speech beyond that.

Ironically, what I wrote about “ICE actions” I could just as well have said about the PSF - nobody seemed to notice that :wink::

But if people with power are determined to “make an example” of you, you’re hosed. Have no expectations of fair play, due process, or justice. You’re a disposable means to their political goals. They don’t care about you at all, or about facts. Zealots are fixated on their abstract idea of “a greater good” to the exclusion of all else (a mix of self-righteous conviction, cynical power-grabbing, and plain love of bullying). You may prevail in the end if there’s also a functioning legal system (which the US government still has, for now, at least partially so), but it may take years.

Although, no, “functioning legal system” doesn’t apply to the PSF.

Drift to reading silence as approval

Not much to say here. The more dissent is suppressed on d.p.o., the less dissent is visible. That doesn’t mean the community is harmonious.

“When we avoid hard conversations, we’re not keeping the peace. We’re just keeping the tension.” - Unknown

As a person just wrote to me (they don’t want their identity known, so I won’t say more), after their own “unpleasant” experiences:

… I’m still autistic, so I will always have trouble judging how my words will make others feel, so it increasingly feels like I’m walking on egg shells [on d.p.o.] which has caused me to greatly reduce my interactions.

If would be fair to counter that someone’s personal bad experiences with moderation don’t imply dissent is being suppressed, but it so happens that this person does dissent - but fears to express it in public. In fact that pattern is common, from all I’ve seen. “Chilling effect” inhibits all expression.

  1. More recent than the PSF’s, which as of this writing is behind the newest in this respect. ↩

  2. I seem to be an exception for now. I couldn’t be plainer about my loss of trust. ↩