I never said or did any of this.
I prefer it when devs/companies remain professional instead of getting mired in forum drama. That’s just my preference. You can do whatever you want. I never said otherwise.
You’ve written multiple paragraphs in response to a single sentence, which you did not even accurately understand. Please reflect on that.
Thanks for sharing. I can’t read your full posts, since they’ve been hidden, but from the quotes I don’t see anything that necessarily warranted removal (even though I disagree with the assertions in those posts).
It seems more clarity on enforcement is needed. PG is ultimately a private entity and is allowed to censor whomever and whatever they want, but I think some visibility into the whys and hows would be best.
@Pragmatic didn’t mean to reply to you, this was meant for @ignoramous
As someone who had no skin in the original discussion between you two, not a staff member but just another user, I hope I can provide some context as a third party.
Key word is “can be”, and I think that was a great opportunity to clear the air, which just didn’t happen.
I’ll have to say my opinion on the discussion to provide more input: directly linking to a fallacy I find a bit rude (but not egregiously insulting), and not relevant to that discussion. The “fallacy fallacy” is that the inherit idea may still be true even if argued poorly (i.e “Mathemetics is my favorite subject, therefore 1+1 must equal 2” - horrible argument, but technically the result is true for other reasons). Regardless of whether or not you argued from authority and failing to provide arguments on another discussion (I haven’t bothered to discern that myself) has no bearing in that discussion on hand. I definitely think that discussion may have been a better DM between you and dngray in hindsight.
However, you did not choose to de-escalate at that point, and that is matter of fact. You can blame moderation for throwing the first punch, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but how you react is up to you and you only. This also does not absolve moderation of their issues either - they can also choose to not be spicy and should be better at de-escalation when possible. Its quite easy to get into a shit throwing fest, but as I said apologizing and then coming at this from a calmer point of view gives everyone time to reflect on what happened and best next steps. We certainly hope moderation apologizes first in most cases. But hey if we remain calm and cool, and they look like the assholes, most readers will start siding with us. If we are all being spicy, well now its just drama.
Here, my perception is that you have quite the bone to pick, and I can definitely pick that up through your tonality. What seems to be happening now is this is coming off as hostile towards somewhat respected members (we can ack there are some issues), and so now many people are reading your posts with that in mind. Fewer are considering your position given the tonality. Even if you are 100% right, its definitely a hard angle to get some change in the community.
I think you have some points, and I think I also have now noticed some general issues from staff, but I think we should take a different approach if we want to be effective.
Have you ever seen Pirates of the Caribbean? There is a quote that goes “the rules are more like guidelines”. Same applies to most forums, chatrooms, and the like I’ve been on. From my experience, we intentionally left the rules vague as to be flexible in enforcement and handle nuance in case users came at us like a rule-book and demanded our heads. That also left it to interpretation, and all the pros and cons that brings and bias from staff. But generally if we were active, nice, and whatnot, we were generally respected on the community.
I suspect the same happens on this forum, as does nearly every other forum with a community. It works for most circumstances, but can definitely be an escape hatch for questionable behavior in terms of favorites (staff and members alike). If there is not consistent moderation, then the attitude of the general forum shifts with it. Not saying this is the best or not, just my experience in how CoC is often interpreted and not a playbook.
I wouldn’t confuse this with super sinister cult like behavior, which has some clearly negative connotations. I think of this as just the general issues with tribal mentality that creep into every aspect of our lives (i.e. nepotism). I think tackling these things requires taking many very acute and specific instances of conduct that can be generalized to a greater lesson and applied. If the community is actually on board with this, then they will due their part in keeping the vibes as well. We should aid staff in providing these examples and saying what we would specifically like as a result - just saying they suck isn’t really gonna do much. If you feel the staff is so far gone, the community is also absolutely wild and horrible, then often its best just to leave; I really don’t think that is the case here, and I think the staff actively would like to improve.
I know you said before you think reporting staff is pointless because other staff read it and think whatever. I actually think its one of the best ways to really stick it to the staff as a community member. If you have a staff member being an asshole or just unhelpful, and you get a bunch of community members to report it and talk to eachother about it, now the staff are forced to look at all of your reports of this staff member and talk to them about why they are being reported.
If a bunch of reports on staff simply go unnoticed or not commented on by the staff, then I think its time to raise pitchforks. But I think we may have skipped a few steps and we are at the pitchfork stage. The staff are mostly comprised of volunteers, probably also learning how to shape the community, which we can provide input on.
How about this: lets tread back and focus on us pointing out the specific issues with less negative spin on it, give them a chance to look at it and see what the community also thinks, and lets take it from there. Thoughts?
PS, I put a lot of thinking into this post, and I’m hoping not only ignoramous read this, but the staff as well. I hope we can de-escalate a bit and get to the meat of the meta discussion.
Maybe I should be a staff member with that wall of text 
apologies for the novel I wrote
I think you read past the part where I mentioned Daniel did not bother replying to my DM.
Multiple instances in the original thread where I request Daniel to cease being derogatory.
This is the right thread for it? Others are free to bring their perspectives, but seeing the way this discussion has manifest, I doubt other project developers would come out now against “respected members” of this forum.
Surprised anyone thinks a non-European user, who brought up their grievances, then harassed by multiple mods, isn’t the “meat” here.
I agree with your post more than I disagree. Thanks for your considerate response.
That’s fine. But there are plenty of people who are just being hostile towards projects just because they don’t like someone involved in them.
There is a guy on the Techlore Forum who is actively trying to harm the project and prevent people from using GrapheneOS. He is also actively insulting Daniel Micay and the rest of the project on Mastadon, calling them idiots, etc., and this continues for like a few years.
Recently, the same guy called one of the forum members a "waste’ and used some other insults that I don’t remember, and he is still engaging on that forum…
There is a difference between you who can dislike something and the difference between someone who dislikes something and tries to harm it or put it down because of it.
That’s also fine. I have my own ideaologies too, one of them being related to FLOSS software, but I will not completely write off other software just because it’s not FLOSS.
Let’s take Apple and iOS. For example, I really don’t like Apple, their proprietary locked-down OSs, etc., but I still recommend iOS and MacOS quite a bit because these are some of the best options for privacy and security.
As for Brave, it’s one of the best browsers regardless of who is the CEO.
Franky, there are a lot of conflicting opinions in this thread. Historically, I’ve personally pretty much never locked or hid posts outside of benign reasons like closing spam or duplicates (and still don’t because I’m bad at moderating lol), and then people complained that people with shitty opinions were just taking over conversations on the forum.
So then we get more team members and moderators to step up and start cleaning things up around here, who are far better at doing so than I am, and we get people complaining that they’re being silenced and that arguments are ending up one-sided.
The unfortunate reality is that there isn’t a “correct answer” to this situation.
I think that there are valid complaints here, but I’m also hesitant to make a lot of changes for what I suspect is more of a vocal minority rather than feedback that’s representative of the entire community. Generally, I personally receive a lot of feedback about how our community is far more informative/nice/welcoming than other communities which I won’t name, and for the most part I agree, but drama (like this) seems to bubble up from time to time too. It’s tricky.
What I might propose to the @team is simply: If one of us is involved in some argument that is getting “heated” (say for example the NextDNS one between @ignoramous and @dngray), we should just ask another team member to handle it from a moderation perspective, instead of doing so ourselves. I feel like we have the resources to do this, so there’s really no reason I can think of to be performing moderation actions on a thread you’re personally already involved with.
I think this would prevent pretty much all the problems I personally have with the current state of forum moderation.
Are we really at your throat though? 
I think that you are mischaracterizing @dngray’s statements from the other thread here. When he’s talking about trying to move on from a specific topic, you’re describing that here as him telling you to “shut up.” When he’s asking for additional sources, you’re describing that as him insulting your intelligence or expertise.
Do I agree with everything @dngray was saying in that thread? Meh… not really, but at the same time I think you are reading too much into “meanings behind the words” that may not even be there.
The NextDNS thread was from 4 months ago and resulted in changes being made to the site anyways, so I’m kind of surprised to hear it’s still an issue. Is there something unresolved?
This advice is generally bad, which is why it is not on the website. The fun thing about the internet is that you can find counter-arguments to every single claim online. I can find a million resources like the one you have found which say to do VPN over Tor, and a million resources which say to do Tor over VPN, etc.
It may be the case that you should not use a VPN before Tor if:
…because then using the same VPN at multiple locations could give you away. I don’t think most people have the resources to pull something like this off effectively though, so it is not a scenario I am particularly concerned about when writing this guide. Plus, even in this scenario using a VPN after Tor isn’t going to help you either, so the advice given in the talk is still bad.
I suspect that he gave this advice because at the time of the talk (2012!) HTTPS was not ubiquitous, and so the risk of a malicious Tor exit node was far greater. Today, person in this scenario would likely be best off not using a VPN at all.
In other media, The Grugq also argues against his own advice that you should use Tor first anyways, acknowledging that Tor usage being visible to your ISP can be riskier than using a VPN, which is exactly what we claim as well.
It is typically more challenging to add features to decentralized platforms, because doing so requires active buy-in from the entire user-base. For example, Facebook can add E2EE to everyone’s messenger with the flip of a switch, whereas XMPP hasn’t managed to get well-functioning E2EE off the ground in 20 years. Other examples: DNSSEC adoption among .com/.net domains still being in single-digit percentages, it took until 2019 to make HTTPS mandatory, etc.
One could argue this is a feature and not a bug, although as a noted XMPP hater myself I have to say I prefer a more centralized approach to development 
Since numerous people in this thread have done this, I have to say I dislike it when people quote the website to complain about something, while omitting sentences directly before or after their quote which elaborate on the thing they’re complaining about.
Just like other decentralized platforms, adding features is more complex for developers than on a centralized platform. Hence, features may be lacking or incompletely implemented, such as offline message relaying or message deletion.
Perhaps the website is not clear enough on what we actually mean though. I generally stand by the idea that every statement on the site is accurate, so when people complain that something is not it seems far more likely to me that the statement is simply misunderstood, which is absolutely possible.
There are a lot of statements/pages on the site that don’t (yet) live up to my personal standards of clarity, the types of communications page is probably one of them
I find it dubious that some lone internet commenter could do either of these things. Saying some guy on the internet is going to prevent people from doing something is like… I don’t know, saying a flat earther is going to “prevent people” from thinking the Earth is round or something. And just like how normal people are able to simply use their brains and deduce that the Earth is indeed round, I think that everybody here is perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions about GrapheneOS or any other project, and are not going to base their opinions off those of a single random stranger.
I have seen zero evidence that GrapheneOS has suffered any “harm” outside of harm which is self-inflicted, and that will probably never change.
Regardless, Techlore is a completely separate project with completely separate moderation policies and practices, and so it is not helpful to bring up here. This would be best addressed on their forum instead.
i think this has already been happening mostly from what i have seen, but yeah that is a good idea generally.
Seems like a good thing to mention in the upcoming volunteers handbook.
Truth perhaps is the wrong word. I’m not going to get into a discussion of the works of Derrida here, but I think Niek is trying to say that the content our site is generally regarded as factual. We try and uphold high standards of integrity, and of course we don’t run ads or have a site littered with affiliate links. We’re more than happy to change things if they’re pointed out as wrong/incorrect - thats what open source is all about 
We do our best to research everything on the site. Not every page is perfect, but we’re trying to change that. Some pages are better than others, and we are constantly updating things. If you think that particular section is poorly produced feel free to open a discussion on the forum.
I’m a big fan of Grugq however on this point we differ, and thats absolutely fine. FWIW, this is from the Tor Project wiki:
You can route Tor through VPN/SSH services. That might prevent your ISP etc from seeing that you’re using Tor (VPN/SSH Fingerprinting below). On one hand, VPNs are more popular than Tor, so you won’t stand out as much, on the other hand, in some countries replacing an encrypted Tor connection with an encrypted VPN or SSH connection, will be suspicious as well. SSH tunnels are not so popular.
Once the VPN client has connected, the VPN tunnel will be the machine’s default Internet connection, and TBB (Tor Browser Bundle) (or Tor client) will route through it.
This can be a fine idea, assuming your VPN/SSH provider’s network is in fact sufficiently safer than your own network.
See also @jonah’s comment here.
I use GrapheneOS every day and think it’s great. Whatever one’s view’s of the leadership of the project, the product itself is very good. It’s the old ‘seperating the art from the artist’ argument…
This seems like a very sensible idea - fully in favour 
The quote from PG says “Do not use” instead of explaining where it might be useful. Not saying PG is providing “wrong” information, but saying its omitting scenarios where it might be useful.
His argument about sticking out and previous argument about network level threats are not contradictory. They are simply analysing two different threat models. I can provide plenty of reputable sources that talk about network analysis on Tor by non-state actors, and how exit node → VPN prevents this. What you have articulated below is something that should be added to the website with regards to where it is useful.
This feels like an example of dismissing sane arguments that go against the website. I am not presenting a random blog post by some click farm bot. Grungq is a very reputable source. Please don’t discredit it by saying you can find “valid” counter arguments for every single claim. This is exactly the issue I wanted resolved when I talked about sourceless claims on the forum.
I can’t find the one person talking about DDG and censorship. But I feel it should be added to the entry about DDG that they do censor results based on something other than algorithms that are the same for every website. I would be loath to trust a search engine that does not treat every website as the same when ranking them, especially since incidents like Iraqi WMDs do not inspire trust in US imposed norms of truthful reporting. To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of Russian Misinformation campaigns.
Sounds good.
The solution for the sourceless claims and eurocentrism is also simple: Provide reputable sources when making claims about any tools, protocols, or companies.
How would sources solve eurocentrism though( even though we esthablished here that we are not euro focused, but could be “western world” focused.
In any case, I am all for adding more sources, but we would have to find a way to add them without adding too much clutter, the side can already by pretty word heavy for non techies as is. To hook up a hyper link to every sentence would probbaly be a bit much, but maybe we can provide more “further reading” sections? or else, maybe provide the used sources in the PR?
It would stop people from saying “Ente bad cuz its in India” or “OpenOffice bad cuz big bad Russia” or “Adguard not good cuz reasons” and other childish non-technical takes without providing incredible, specific proof about what exactly makes the specific service/tool/platform bad.
Lmao what a take. Hopefully most people here do not think like you do. Some points:
Please be mindful of the Code of Conduct before replying 
I am sorry you feel that way Good luck with your 53K member group!
Regarding this feedback, we are going to be stricter about low effort, low quality posting and have published a statement on what types of posts are no longer permitted. Hopefully this improves the situation!