Hi bitcoin-dev,

I'm well aware that discussion of moderation on bitcoin-dev is discouraged*. However, I think that we should, as a year of moderation approaches, discuss openly as a community what the impact of such policy has been. Making such a post now is timely given that people will have the opportunity to discuss in-person as well as online as Scaling Bitcoin is currently underway. On the suggestion of others, I've also CC'd bitcoin-discuss on this message.

Below, I'll share some of my own personal thoughts as a starter, but would love to hear others feelings as well.

For me, the bitcoin-dev mailing list was a place where I started frequenting to learn a lot about bitcoin and the development process and interact with the community. Since moderation has begun, it seems that the messages/day has dropped drastically. This may be a nice outcome overall for our sanity, but I think that it has on the whole made the community less accessible. I've heard from people (a > 1 number, myself included) that they now self-censor because they think they will put a lot of work into their email only for it to get moderated away as trolling/spam. Thus, while we may not observe a high rate of moderated posts, it does mean the "chilling effect" of moderation still manifests -- I think that people not writing emails because they think it may be moderated reduces the rate of people writing emails which is a generally valuable thing as it offers people a vehicle through which they try to think through and communicate their ideas in detail.

Overall, I think that at the time that moderation was added to the list, it was probably the right thing to do. We're in a different place as a community now, so I feel we should attempt to open up this valuable communication channel once again. My sentiment is that we enacted moderation to protect a resource that we all felt was valuable, but in the process, the value of the list was damaged, but not irreparably so.

Best,

Jeremy

* From the email introducing the bitcoin-dev moderation policy, "Generally discouraged: shower thoughts, wild speculation, jokes, +1s, non-technical bitcoin issues, rehashing settled topics without new data, moderation concerns."