Tone can often be more important than facts.

At one point in my career I had a somewhat public facing role. I made a tough decision that aggravated a user, who decided to send me several death threats. Suddenly that tough decision wasn’t so tough anymore. Any possible resolution was gone.

These situations involve people. We aren’t fact machines.

> Tone can often be more important than facts.

Exactly: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181

That is really useful:

> Russell Conjugation (or “emotive conjugation”) is a presently obscure construction from linguistics, psychology and rhetoric which demonstrates how our rational minds are shielded from understanding the junior role factual information generally plays relative to empathy in our formation of opinions.

> Years later, the data-driven pollster Frank Luntz stumbled on much the same concept unaware of Russell’s earlier construction. By holding focus-groups with new real time technology that let participants share emotional responses to changes in authoritative language, Luntz was lead to make a stunning discovery that pushed Russell’s construction out of the realm of linguistics and into the realm of applied psychology. What he found was extraordinary: many if not most people form their opinions based solely on whatever Russell conjugation is presented to them and not on the underlying facts.

And the last sentence:

> (Humans) fear (that) authentic emotions will get us into trouble with our social group, and so continue to look to others to tell us what is safe to feel.

By e.g. paying attention to if the speaker said "whistle blower" or "snitch"

brilliantly explored in 'yes prime minister': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey

this was very helpful. Never heard of 'Russell conjugation' before.

Good read. Formalizes what Fox News etc. do to everything they spout out.

the entire mainstream media no longer just reports on the facts, but now has to in the reporters opinions and feelings too...

I think the point is that these people just sound like they are barking up the wrong tree. They're bitching at a non-profit org who gives away their services for free for not doing things exactly the way they want. And then getting self-righteously upset when said non-profit bans them for acting in an abusive manner.

> The tone is not more important than the facts. It never is.

This is 100% wrong. Tone does matter. If you want someone to do something for you, acting entitled and insulting them usually isn't going to get you where you want to go. Unfortunately straight facts don't sway hearts and minds. That is just how human psychology works. I wish it were different, but wishing does not make it so (speaking of facts!).

The Signal team does not owe these people a way to conduct private secure conversations. Yet they are working on it anyway, because they believe it's the right thing to do. And I bet it's pretty demotivating for a bunch of people to come and tell them that they're doing it wrong and their current interim efforts are useless. No one is owed an explanation or dialogue from the Signal team, and behaving aggressively in order to demand one is about the most unproductive thing they could do.

> The tone is not more important than the facts. It never is.

This is an error software engineers sometimes make.

When working with human beings, tone matters. Tone always matters. "Nature cannot be fooled," but presenting facts with the wrong tone can lead to them being discarded, harming the project and/or people involved. You get better outcomes recognizing that people make better decisions when they aren't emotionally tilted.

The successful projects operated by people who don't know how to interact with other people are significant outliers (and in some cases, their creators and maintainers have recanted their past approach as counter-productive, ref. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...).

The thing about Mother Nature is her dependability, not only can she not be fooled, she's the firmest conceivable foundation upon which to build. When you're depending upon tone that's never more than a subtle shift of tone from disaster. "Four legs good, Two legs bad" becomes "Four legs good, Two legs better" so easily.

I agree with you that tone matters, but I think that's a bad thing, a weakness or vulnerability. We should take "tone matters" into consideration the same way we'd take "OCSP without stapling results in a query to the CA for each leaf certificate examined, thereby harming privacy" into consideration. Can we prevent it? Can we mitigate the resulting harms? We definitely shouldn't celebrate it.

> not only can she not be fooled, she's the firmest conceivable foundation upon which to build

I agree.

What do we do with that observation when we then observe that human beings care so deeply about how they're being interacted with by other human beings? We are products of nature, after all.

>The tone is not more important than the facts. It never is

I think this framing is wrong. Tone and facts are both important (often equally so) and must both be addressed in parallel tracks.

If someone rudely raises concerns about the security of your product, it's fine to ban them as long as you also address their claims of insecurity. You can kill a community by not addressing claims of technical flaws and you can kill a community by not enforcing standards of conduct within it.

> The tone is not more important than the facts

Of course it can be. If your tone is so bad, that nobody listens to you or implements things that you want, then it doesn't matter how right you are on anything.

Getting stuff done and solving problems relies on way more things than just being right.

> Im not suggesting you have some alternative motive to deflect the facts.

Ok but by making these comments you are also deflecting from real problems that having a bad tone causes.

People respond poorly to abuse. This is basic human nature, trying to fight against this is a fool’s errand.

I agree, it is a chain of poor responses to abuse, these people probably considered the original response that they got (along with having their pull request deleted) as an abuse which is why they responded in that way.

I don't really have any particular opinion on Moxie or Signal; I've never interacted with either the product, the community, or the person. But I will say in the abstract that many founders drastically underestimate how much extra headache poor community management will cause them in the long run.

> there isn't a currently easily available obvious way to have private secure conversations.

Ricochet[1] works really well. It uses Tor hidden services to communicate. Your Ricochet ID is your onion address. To add a contact, you input their Ricochet ID and a short message, and Ricochet connects to their onion address and sends a contact request. If the contact request is accepted then you'll each show up as a contact on each other's client and can chat whenever you want.

Tor is really perfect for this, you can't get more private or censorship-resistant than Tor.

The UI is currently not great, but that's not a protocol problem.

The biggest problem with Ricochet is that hardly anyone is using it.

Private secure conversations: yes.

Easily available: yes.

Obvious: sadly not, for most people :(.

[1] https://ricochet.im/

Doesn't the security of Tor depend on the proposition "Surely my opponent would never operate a bunch of exit nodes"? That has always been my impression, and it seems like a problem when your opponent is a state actor.

Hidden services don't use exit nodes.

You could first charitably strengthen their argument by silently correcting “exit nodes” to “nodes”. The core point stands.

I don't think the core point does stand.

1. To deanonymise a hidden service connection you need to observe the traffic of all of the nodes in the circuit.

2. OK, let's say your adversary controls all of the nodes in the circuit and deanonymises the endpoints. Now what? You're no worse off than you would be if you weren't using Tor in the first place, so it's not an argument against Tor at all. All it's saying is "the absolute worst case of using Tor is no worse than the best case of not using Tor".

> the absolute worst case of using Tor is no worse than the best case of not using Tor

While this is true I just wanted to point out that one does in fact not need *all* the nodes. It is possible to perform traffic analysis and infer which nodes are used by a certain user even if the attacker only controls a part of the nodes. [1]

While this of course doesn't change the fact that using tor is a good idea, one should not let themselves be lured into a wrong feeling of security when using tor.

[1]: https://murdoch.is/papers/oakland05torta.pdf

I think we are both talking about tone. While you are saying that expressing emotions and the drama is important in a discussion over Signals' future, I believe that such conduct only drives a wedge into it. These issues are emotional and affect important freedoms, but while expressing them is important doing it in such a high-profile, damaging way can only bruise egos and create even more tension. Instead, both parties should sit down and take a long, serious look at their grievances and how they will address them.

How exactly do both parties sit down to discuss their grievances when the incumbent party is clearly banning the party with a different perspective?

They're banning the other party for their abusive language and behaviour, for their unsubstantiated, bad-faith claims of suppression and for misusing project resources. On top of the fact that they're not listening to why their assertions are incorrect.

Any party acting in such a belligerent, infantile manner is going to be banned since they have proven they cannot act like grown-ups in a grown-up setting.

That's a fair point and I agree with you. Something I've been wondering as of lately, what can we (as a society) do to move off the edge of high emotions? I feel as if it's a common theme anywhere I look.

It's a very tough problem to solve, especially given how social media algorithms stir outrage and throw civility away for higher engagement numbers.

We must start reading the rules of the online places we visit, as a start, and obeying them. If we don't agree with the rules, don't like "codes of conduct"? Fine, we do not participate there at all.

It's their house and we abide by their rules.

If we break a rule and it's pointed out, then we apologise and goto 10: read and follow the rules. We do not throw tantrums, we do not cry "censorship! suppression!".

We act in good faith: if we post a thread, open an issue, submit a PR, and it is closed, then we do not simply repeat our action. Whether we agree with the closure or not, repeating is an attempt at evasion and a smack in the face of those running the place. Either of these two behaviours then invite us to be banned, because we have acted in bad faith.

We do not immediately and vocally assume that an act we don't like is a personal attack against ourselves or our values. If our post is "hidden by the community", this does does not mean "the leadership of the project is orchestrating an agenda against us". It means our peers have found our conduct distasteful and is a very loud alarm that we must heed: that we have behaved outside of the expected conduct and our peers found it distasteful, unhelpful, insulting. If a web site algorithm has prevented us from posting a link, an image because our account is new or it has triggered anti-spam measures, we do not post elsewhere about how we're being persecuted.

We invite like-minded people to join the discussion when they have innovative ideas, when they can add material to a discussion that has not yet been supplied, an angle that has not been addressed, or a concept that has been misunderstood. We never ping our friends to jump on our bandwagon, shouting the same things over and over again. Perhaps if a concern is dismissed as an outside, then more voices can be constructive, but they must conduct themselves with civility and be particularly aware that they need to add to the discussion, not to add pressure.

If a counterpoint is given to something we passionately believe in, then to discuss is to use logic and data to refute it. In the ideal, we ask ourselves to fight for this counterpoint: perhaps it is entirely valid? What we must refrain from is reading a fair and polite counterpoint and immediately treating it as an attack, a dismissal. This prompts a counter-attack and we are no longer discussing - we are now detracting from the point. When we make our issue or improvement a negative it reflects back upon us. Who wishes to discuss with a party that cannot cope with rational disagreement? In addition, we must resist the urge to simply exaggerate our cause: to state an incorrect point more loudly does not make it correct, it just antagonises those who disagree. Those who we are trying to see our reasons, our solutions, or problems.

Once we have broken the rules, assumed and publicised bad faith, breached expected conduct, ignored the ire of our peers, evaded bans, repeated actions which were turned down, called on our friends to flame and troll, replied to constructive criticism with louder voices, manipulated the conversation with hyperbole and outright refused to listen to the possibility we may be wrong...then we hold a beacon above our heads, advertising that we are incapable of joining a rational debate and seek not to improve anything but only be told we are right and righteous.

I say this not to you, but to answer your question: if anyone reads what has transpired in this matter, and then asks your question, they need to very deeply analyse their behaviour because it is unacceptable in any civilised society.

I'm sorry, but we don't read replies longer than 140 characters or that use the word "persecuted". Please create a new account and re-submit your argument in the form of a haiku.

Having made rules is not sufficient for those rules to be just. Rules are not themselves authority bearing - nor can one side be upset when they make obnoxious rules and get push back. When you respond to criticism of those rules by deleting the criticisms... well it's clear you are no longer hosting an open forum and instead trying to shut down speech you don't like.

The posters did not use insults, they did not attack the people behind signal - they pointed out that the statement regarding the proxies was false (which it factually was) and that the circumvention that Signal gave was likely insufficient for most users. Shutting down a potentially serious security bug because it's in the wrong spot or because you don't like the tone is bullshit - it tell me you as a person care more about tone policing then keeping your users safe. When you're doing battle against nation-states who like to jail their dissidents, you don't get to reap half-successes.

This isn't a child's baseball game, this is a situation where lives are at risk. "Sorry, we really tried to put out the fire, but your yard sign made me upset and I had to go write in my journal instead of doing my job."

> Having made rules is not sufficient for those rules to be just

Quite. And if one doesn't think the rules are just, then simply don't play the game. However, rules such as "don't spam an issue", "don't spam a PR", "don't insult others", "please use the forum for this discussion" strike me as being simple, sensible and just rules. Which rules are unjust, in this context?

> Rules are not themselves authority bearing - nor can one side be upset when they make obnoxious rules and get push back.

In a dictatorship - such as a web site forum - the rules are, in fact, authority bearing. Since a user or their content can be removed at the whim of an operator, that authority is proven. This entire dramatic performance has been because the entirety of one "side" is upset when they've been subjected to pushback because they have broken the rules, and the authority of those rules has been effected.

> When you respond to criticism of those rules by deleting the criticisms... well it's clear you are no longer hosting an open forum and instead trying to shut down speech you don't like.

You are conflating what happened here. A user committed malconduct (of the sort that most projects would react badly to) and their offending material was deleted because it was an unhelpful duplicate placed in the wrong forum. Such content can only be deleted because it is...unhelpful, duplicate and in the wrong forum. All that was needed was the discussion moved to where it was expected. GitHub projects are not open forums and the PR was not speech.

> The posters did not use insults, they did not attack the people behind signal

I refute this statement with the following: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/15#issuec... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/15#issuec... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/15#issuec... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/15#issuec... https://community.signalusers.org/t/why-signal-blocked-me-fr... (more a threat than insult, I guess) https://community.signalusers.org/t/why-signal-blocked-me-fr... https://community.signalusers.org/t/why-signal-blocked-me-fr...

> Shutting down a potentially serious security bug

They were not shut down to begin with - they were simply asked to post in the correct forum. Once they started their abusive behaviour they had to be shut down because they couldn't behave themselves.

> This isn't a child's baseball game, this is a situation where lives are at risk. "Sorry, we really tried to put out the fire, but your yard sign made me upset and I had to go write in my journal instead of doing my job."

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here, other than proving one of my latter points.

> I refute this statement with the following..

If any of those so much as raise an eyebrow, you must be the most sheltered darling on the entire internet. "Moxie and Signal is shit"? Really? I get called worse names in online gaming by kids.

> ..their offending material was deleted because it was an unhelpful...

Their offending material was a security issue! A fair amount of people seem to share their concerns. If it's in the wrong place then move it, and if it's a duplicate then close it and add a link to the original where conversation is happening. If you can't handle basic moderation of your forum, then stop using your damned forum and maybe use github issues like every other project.

> In a dictatorship...

Yeah, Signal can throw a tantrum, take their toys and go home. So can us as their userbase and the people who recommend it. Right now I'm one of those people who can be reached on Signal and who recommends it to others - and if Signal can't find a way to appropriately receive feedback then I'm no longer going to be doing that.

> Once they started their abusive behaviour they had to be shut down..

No. They didn't. Signal staff could have literally just responded: "Hey, thank you for the report, we're examining this now and will update as we can. Please mind the language." That's literally all it would have taken. Instead Signal continues to stick it's head in the sand and ruin it's relationship with it's users.

> The tone is not more important than the facts. It never is.

We don’t live in the same world. Without proper tone, my message is never received. And yours is?

> So what should we use instead of signal?

Threema is one alternative.

I recently bought Threema and I can only say that I like it more than Signal. Now it even has local (meaning your images don't leave your phone) object detection in images, global search in chats, etc. The only thing that's missing is usage on multiple devices and a native desktop client - but the app itself is great so far.

Or Session

Telegram?