One post. His posting rights haven't been withdrawn, it's one message in context which was elided out.
[edit: I am somewhat surprised people want to down-vote a factual statement, which in part aligns to the OP who changed the title of the post since it was being wrongly inferred his posting rights had gone, not a single post was being hidden. As the saying goes "you do you"]
I also don’t fully understand why some folks are worked up. We all have posts that are downvoted and removed even here on HN. If you don’t like the steering committee or whatever, just elect a new one.
Because he founded ycombinator, he should be allowed at least a little more leniency.
Of course if he goes around directly and explicitly bashing all sorts of minorities or doxxes some other users or commits any other actual big nono, sure remove him.
This is not what happened. GvR was impolite at worst, and impolite your founder shall be allowed to be
Yes, please help me understand why this is a big deal!
A committee that was chosen by a community decided to remove a post. It looks like the removal was well within their authority. If the community disagrees with the committee, they can move discussion to another venue, elect a new committee, and so on, no?
None of this adversely affects the performance or reliability of software written in python.
This doesn't directly affect the software as it currently stands.
It's mainly about the organisation. The people in charge have some a sequence of things that have increasingly alarmed people who care about the organisation of the project. More people are getting interested in what has happened with each step. This is one of the latest actions where even the key person who started Python has been impacted. This shows that the actions they were doing are important and worthy of attention as anyone who interacts within the organisation is within the reach of potential impact. No-one is untouchable. Outside though to the rest of us it's not directly impactful currently.
So then there is the impacts on wider things like software. As you say the community can just vote out the ones they dislike and vote in a new bunch. To me and many others, this sounds it should solve the situation. However I think some others see the problems as systemic, where the actions taken are a result of how the management organisation is structured and so the problems will occur again even if new people were in charge. If that's the case then more of a change might be demanded which could affect the software. (But in what ways is unclear)
On a HN scale, there's a wider sociological and cultural issue of how large open source software projects should be organised. And this is an example showing the problems of certain approaches especially as certain things were directly for reducing abuse and yet seem to be used in an abusive way. For many here on HN who are in various communities with similar structures, seeing what happens here is very important to them. There is a varying amount of personal investment in this story about the users own lives more than Python itself.
It looks like the removal was well within their authority
this is what i'd like to know more about. should they have this authority? especially to remove any posts in a non-transparent way? such a level of authority should be limited to removing obviously illegal or age-restricted content, but not the kind of message in question. and even then, it should require oversight from someone outside the committee, ideally people specifically trained for handling such messages.
Yup, and while I don't know the overlap between the committees, it seems like the CoC committee gave a recommendation to the Steering Committee, and the Steering Committee acted on the findings, and it wasn't just an instant ban hammer on Tim either.
Hiding Guido's comment I could see being controversial, but I also believe allowing relitigation or reinsertion of harmful drama in governance discussions as being disruptive. Hiding the comment wasn't punitive.
Also the project shouldn't go into freeze mode because a valuable contributor is doing time for a crime, such a practice would be super destructive to the project. It'd basically give filibuster power to any contributor of sufficient 'clout' to derail and delay any steering committee decisions indefinitely
[edit: I am somewhat surprised people want to down-vote a factual statement, which in part aligns to the OP who changed the title of the post since it was being wrongly inferred his posting rights had gone, not a single post was being hidden. As the saying goes "you do you"]