Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 26:

Be too public about a ban and you risk reputational harm to people that may be viewed as too much “punishment” for the transgressions.

The problem is that you put the quotes around the word punishment, rather than around the word transgressions.

But keep it all quiet and people feel like they don’t know the practices here.

And when they inevitably find out, there are at least as upset about the decision as they would be if you had been up front about it.

Also, they don’t just feel that way. It’s objectively true, clearly.

I had a much longer rant in this post originally, responding to a different line from your post. But I think that content would be better off-site. Instead, I’ll just take a moment to remind you: David Mertz helped write and enact the CoC, has oodles of social-justice/feminism/marxism/what-have-you cred, and is now telling you directly that recent interpretation is utterly ridiculous.

People don’t know what the practices are, because the practices demonstrably are not what the CoC says they are.

Even though the people enforcing it say that they are.

Because the enforcement policy demands such a difference.

Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 26:

But at either end of that spectrum you used the term akin to “fear”. Now we obviously try to balance all of this when making decisions around the CoC, but this is part of what makes this all such a hard (volunteer) job to do.

We all know very well that you volunteer for the job. But it’s really interesting how everyone who actually volunteers and gets selected is like-minded.

But also, please keep in mind that the people being disciplined are equally well volunteering their own time.