If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.
If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.
Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Tax collectors operating within this incentive structure were not likely to be very likable.
This was possible because it was a slave society, and it was possible for the tax collector to collect your children into slavery in lieu of unpaid taxes. In some areas in Anatolia, which were close to the border of the empire and thus had a significant military presence that the tax collectors could fall back on, so the local population had no possibility to push back, entire societies were ended because the Roman publicans collected all children once they reached the age where they could be profitably sold (circa ~10 years or so, and sold usually to sexual slavery), and did so for long enough that the populations collapsed, never recovered, and were eventually replaced by other populations transplanted from elsewhere in the empire. (Later, the power of the publicani was seriously curtailed, in small parts because even the Romans thought that some of their practices were abhorrent. Albeit mostly because of internal power struggles with the senator class.)
So yes, people in the provinces had plenty of reasons to hate the tax collectors.
On the one hand, they were a cultural byword for a morally degraded profession at the time. "Tax collectors and prostitutes" is a phrase that comes up not infrequently in the gospels, and not just out of Jesus' mouth So apparently the practice of tax collecting was a little weird in the Roman Empire.
On the other hand, he was known for having dinner with tax collectors and prostitutes. One of his 12 disciples was a tax collector.
Before I was into open source I was always afraid to show my code to anyone because of the critique I could expect. But some coworkers helped me get the confidence I needed to go open source (within the company, not public internet). Being completely open about everything and accepting critique publicly really helped me grow as a developer to also be open to others. I wonder if I would have made the same transformation if I was only critiqued in private.
On the other hand, it's not normal and not often practiced to go digging to see whose mistake introduced a bug and call them out in public on it - that would be what shouldn't be done at all.
Not only (technical) bugs are reported, but also design decisions and such. A lot of those things often come down to difference in opinion. I've seen some developers be really adamant about how a bug was actually a feature.
> The openness of issue trackers even helps elevate that.
I agree partly. For me it helped see things different and make a positive growth. But I can image some staying afraid to enter or be deterred really quick never coming back.
>> This follows the "praise in public, punish in private" maxim.
So like the previous poster said. I am wondering if Github et al. should not contain a private channel.
I have a email on my Github page. And besides spammers I sometimes get questions regarding my projects. I don't know if it is due to people not understanding Github that well[0] or wanting to contact privately[1]. But for some reason they didn't open a public issue[2].
[0] I've met a lot of technical people that just are afraid of Github because it is complex. Electrical engineers, mechanics, embedded engineers. People I figure would understand software development concepts.
[1] Asking a stupid question publicly could also count toward making a public mistake depending on how secure someone feels about themselves.
[2] There is of course also the discussion if issues should be your projects helpdesk next to being an bug tracker. And raising an 'issue' for something that might just be a question might feel strange for some.
And sometimes they are feature, and it's the users that are mistaken on what the project they are using is offering them. It's a fine line, I'm sure, but different projects have different goals, and those goals will align to a specific user's needs differently depending on the user.
> So like the previous poster said. I am wondering if Github et al. should not contain a private channel.
It might depend quite a bit on the project. In an open source project with many contributors, there isn't really any meaning to "private" other than "limited to a subgroup of the people that care", and those people may have little to nothing with the design and implementation of the items in question. In a project that is mostly driven by one author that controls it and accepts some patches, that might be a lot different, and criticism may be received differently.
There's a whole spectrum there, and even if you provide the tools to allow different types of contact, what's to prevent people from using the wrong tool most the time? Rust, PHP, Perl, Bind, Apache etc aren't going to benefit much for a private list for first contact of regular bugs, but people would use it. Meanwhile someone's random personal project is still going to get people making public requests even if they prefer them private. In the end, I think we're all better served by a "public by default" for open source stuff, and for things people feel is actually private (security related items, for example), they'll look up a private contact or personal contact for someone related.
I contributed to launching a few products. After countless hours of design debates, code writing, code review, the baby was finally ready to see the world ... but nobody cared. Not even a drive-by troll bothered writing "this is completely useless".
My Motto: "That product sucks, but wow! It made it on the shelf."