Description
As the Bitcoin industry, community and userbase grew a number of sub-communities of enthusiasts of various persuasions formed. Some of these communities bring together individual strongly committed to a single issue, almost cult-like, and with apparently a lot of time on their hands. Although they are tiny groups of persons at the scale of the Bitcoin industry or userbase, they still represent a sufficient number of motivated individuals to create significant disruption to the project. Bitcoin Core pull requests related to the one issue of a community often get shared among them (generally on social media), unleashing a significant amount of spam on the thread.
bitcoin/bitcoin#32359 is the latest, ongoing, example. I am starting this discussion because i triggered this by posting to the mailing list and, quite frankly, i feel bad about how much moderator time my actions indirectly wasted. This has also wasted time from other contributors to a lesser extent.
I'm concerned these spam attacks may have a chilling effect on contributors to the Bitcoin Core project, leading them to spend time on other things to avoid controversy and wasting other people's time. I think this is a terrible outcome, as this effectively means a tiny vocal minority of aggressive individuals could prevent changes that Bitcoin Core contributors believe are in the interest of the wide majority of users of Bitcoin Core, or the Bitcoin network.
I think the current amount of disruption calls for stricter moderation. I was initially moderately opposed to locking up threads to Github org members, but it seems this should now be on the table.