> The message is that the others are bad

The message is that they're bad and the fact that they did these bad things proves they're bad.

And the key thing here is that we need to decide if we believe "they did these bad things". If the person reporting them is well known as someone the is truthful and trustworthy, we're likely to believe them with little proof. If the person reporting them is well known as a bad person that does things to harm others for their own benefit... we're less likely to believe them until we can verify the truth of their statements.

You're completely skipping over the "is this person telling the truth" part; I assume because they're saying things that fit in with your pre-existing view of the world. And that's not a good thing.

Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.

This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".

1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.

2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.

You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).

It doesn't mean that what they're saying is a lie, but it puts them firmly in the bucket where what they say needs to be verified.

And that's only the start of where it gets complicated

- Ingesting data from 3rd party systems

- Translating content to other languages

- Front end user auth and preferences

- Personalized content

- A/B testing

- Multiple sites in the same CMS, sharing the same content

The list of things that add on to make a cms (and the sites it is used to create) more complicated is enormous.

AND they're putting private information at risk by working with Panantir

I was on a department-wide call; many, many years ago. The person talking was telling us how well we were doing and how we needed to grow. At the end, they asked if there were any questions (which, thinking back, seems odd given the size of the meeting, but.. it was a long time ago). I asked them "Why? Why do we need to grow? We're doing a good job at our core business. We're making money doing it. Why do we need to expand; specifically expand our offerings into something that _isn't_ our core".

My question didn't get answered. But it _is_ a valid one, imo.

It can, or it can't; depending on the situation. Sometimes it just adds weight to the mental model (because now there's another variable in scope).

We learned so many years ago that separating code and data was important for security. It's such a huge step backwards that it's been tossed in the garbage.

> What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.

There's a LARGE grey area between those two. It's entirely possible to value someone's emotions _and_ not waste a bunch of time.

And yes, other people's emotional reactions to what you say _should_ matter to you. Because 1) empathy matters and 2) you need to continue working with those people. It's a pretty widely held belief that the people are say "I'm not being mean, I'm just stating the truth; I'm a straight shooter" and, in fact, just jerks.

I don't have the right answers. I don't know that there _is_ a right answer.

> Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.

Or they're unwilling to risk the consequences of making a mistake.

> the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.

But, in my example, you don't lose the ability to post some stupid adult-looking meme. You lose the ability to post ANY meme. Because the risk of someone posting something over the line is that the entire server is suddenly adult only. And for something like a game server, that's can be a catastrophic change; it can destroy the community.

Is being able post memes that important? No, probably not. But giving up the entire ability to do something fun, that doesn't cause any real harm, because someone might do something stupid... and the response to that will be a full nuclear destruction of your community. Yeah, that part sucks.

- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not

- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.

So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.