If these types of people are in leadership positions, it’s too late and you need to move. If they’re below you, then you need to limit their reach and upward mobility.
Usually fair application of performance standards will flush them out anyways. Often people like that in your organization are shielded by a manager that’s protecting them.
The community does play a role in the ecosystem you’re buying into. You will most likely need to send PR’s / bug reports in at some point. If the core team tends to ignore bugs/external contributions, it is a point to consider.
Furthermore, if your first knee-jerk reaction to the behaviour you think undesirable in reports is to “limit their reach and upward mobility” I think you need to think seriously about what mentorship means.
without a mod team, you will still boot trolls or resolve a dispute. I think it's better to have a judge who can step in and resolve a situation than proactive police when it comes to OSS moderation.
My POV is one of privilege (I hate that word and concept, but it fits here). Being part of the majority most of the ways you can slice IT - except I am older but that one was a change!
In other fields I was made aware of what it is like to be part of other groups, and it can suck. I got married. My spouse took me on a tour playing "spot the detective". They got followed around shops in a way that never happens to me. When we stood together at a bar, they were served after me, every time.
A lot of people here know this from personal experience, a lot of people here it is academic reality, a lot of people here simply do not understand. OK. Believe me, it is real
I have been involved in groups that make efforts to embrace people from outside the main dominant (majority) slices (how ever you choose to slice it) and groups that do not. The former is much better.
Rust has truly benefited from it. Those in the comfy majority, it turns out, benefit too. I do.
Compare Rust and Swift (I use Swift professionally, Rust for fun) There is no comparison. Swift has so many corners that have not been rounded off. The ergonomics is mostly much worse (unwrap V ! is an exception). Memory management in Swift is almost non-existent, the threading model is appallingly bad. I could go on, but on one side is a vibrant community, on the other is a bunch of alphas, astroturf, and the weeds rolling through almost empty Apple forums.
The mod teams are a very important part of making the community a good place, making the community a good place is crucial for making the technology good.
Moderation teams are the cultural equivalent of a code smell.
The role of moderation is strictly to remove spam and move off-topic chit chat to the off topic bin. The expanded post-modern role of “moderation” is inherently toxic and degrading.
You have now painted a target on your project, every activist that finds your CoC in non-compliance now has:
1) a means to proposition your submission
2) a cudgel to bang you with should you reject #1
A far saner solution is to ban CoC and those who request a CoC. The CoC then becomes “don’t request a CoC”. Tolerance paradox in action.
It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself.
It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities.
> There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious"
A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.
Actually, the best example of a project where the leadership of the project was so toxic as to drive away potential contributors would probably be glibc under Ulrich Drepper, which got so bad that most distributions abandoned glibc for the eglibc fork. (See https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ for a high-level discussion).
I know very little about NetBSD and am a great fan of OpenBSD.
But Theo is a very horrible person who often attacks people in a personal way for disagreeing with him. I got into a stupid argument with him over fundraising - a subject where I have deep experience - and it was quite bizarre. He had a set of assumptions and disagreeing with them got abuse from him, and some of his minions on the OpenBSD-Misc list, and (I was astonished) abuse in my INBOX from throw away accounts.
What an arsewipe!
All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police?
Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.
I'm not inside the Linux developers' world, but from the outside it seems like a much healthier, more vibrant place since Linus realized that he works with human beings.
Actually, primarily they're reminding me that there's a human being on the other side of the screen watching everything I do in case I fuck up. How this is supposed to make anyone want to participate is a mystery to me.
edit: The weird thing to me is that these people are so hyper-vigilant to the damage bad behavior can do, and utterly blind to the idea that their own behavior can also be damaging. If I ever read a sentence like "we know that overmoderation and tone-policing can create toxic communities, and we're watching out for that" from a moderation team, I will know that this is a community that I can trust to be administered in an even-handed and fair manner. So far I have seen this once.
And to that- who knows? Certainly the point of a CoC is supposed to be to codify this, but I believe experience shows that its interpretation tends to be expansive, when the wording is not already expansive to begin with.
At the end of the day, events like Curtis Yarvin, a person who has never harmed a fly, almost getting banned from Lambdaconf over "safety" concerns, demonstrate that the fuck-up may just be having a political difference of opinion with the group in question.
(Analogously, and I say this as somebody who would vote Dems every time if they lived in the US, a moderation team that included at least one Trump voter would also assuage such concerns. Consider it a commitment to diversity.)
edit: To be clear, I am not asking for anything resembling quotas; just any demonstration of the ability of the team to coexist with a person they have serious ideological disagreements with.
>Yarvin's online writings, many under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, convey blatantly racist views. He expresses the belief that white people are genetically endowed with higher IQs than black people. He has suggested race may determine whether individuals are better suited for slavery, and his writing has been interpreted as supportive of the institution of slavery.
https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/why-it-matters-that-an-obs...
You're upset that a Eugenics-lite writer was almost banned from a conference?
Curtis Yarvin is a bellwether - the sort of person that any group that starts excluding people for ideological disagreements, would probably exclude first precisely because his position is so problematic. So any group that accepts his technical contribution can obviously be trusted to tolerate any less-severe ideological disagreement. Conversely, any group that doesn't, especially when they have to make up nonexistent concerns to do it because their rules didn't cover this "obvious" reason to kick someone out and couldn't be hastily adjusted, must be viewed with caution.
I personally don't hold any beliefs nearly as objectionable as that. But I do hold objectionable beliefs - as I believe any halfway interesting person does. And those who don't, probably will eventually. Just stand by your convictions and give it time.
See also LambdaConf's conclusion on why they should allow him to participate anyway: https://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion I agree with this article fully.
Sure you don't have to, but if you do, it's a hell of a signal. (At any rate, Curtis Yarvin was invited for his semi-esoteric functional-based distributed operating platform, Urbit.)
> If you're protecting personnel, even after a number of others in your community have shown disagreement with the person's actions (and protections afterwards), just admit you agree with those thoughts.
Sorry, I don't. Of course, you'll believe that I do anyway, and that's fine. I do think it's a bit sad that you think that the only reason someone could want somebody to be included, is because they were your ideological compatriots.
In fact, the only reason I want anyone to be included in a conference is if they have contributions to the conference's topic.
It sounds like we just have a difference in moral standards.
Well - at least if I ever run a conference, you can be confident that you will be welcome to it anyways. :)
Even when it comes to unpleasant people like Moldbug I try to avoid talk of moral standards beyond the really clear-cut ones...
Not evil, an exaggeration but still: would you want to be in the presence of some body so bigoted? Who thought you inferior because because because?
If there is a conference being organized about some technology, I'd like to see speakers who have the most to contribute, on that merit only. I couldn't care less if they march around with armbands on in their spare time. I'm suggesting that more people learn to compartmentalize.
That would be nice... unfortunately, filter bubbles are such that it's hard for most people just to locate a reasonable person who has serious ideological disagreements with them. The current polarisation didn't happen in a vacuum.
Yeah, and probably exactly like that.
Your counter examples are questionable at best.
Anyway, regarding Richard Stallman and those accusations of “various kinds of sexual misconduct”:
The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
Since you seem to have a great interest in this, do have any concrete reference to the “Emacs virgin” situation? I have only a vague recollection that Stallman was referring to anyone who had not used Emacs yet as an “Emacs virgin”, and some people took it as meaning some kind of sex thing.
(Any other references to the “many of the accusations against Stallman” that wasn’t referenced in the linked article would also be interesting to see.)
I don't think this is a fair counter example, he's been accused for expressing personal opinions, on his personal blog.
The accusations led to nothing.
Linus changed his tones just recently, now that he's older and have children, the "previous version" of Linus brought Linux to where it is though.
He's still very harsh when things get highly technical, because he's one of the few people that know at heart what's best for Linux.
Communal decision making, however, does not have that advantage. If both sides of an issue, so to speak, become turned off of one another, you are more likely to have an abandoned project. There are, of course, other advantages (you don't miss generally accepted "good ideas" because of the particular vision of one person, and you can apply community standards to everyone, rather than having to weigh "continued participation in this project that is important to you" vs "dealing with -that- asshole again"), but that is definitely one con.
I hear this "a lot" very often, but then it seems to be from people who have no real interest in technical work of kernel/OS core development. Linux is not the only way to scratch your itch for interest in low-level system dev. Like, this is just personal experience, but I have heard this on the order of 50-100 times: someone parroting how toxic Linux kernel dev is because of drama they heard -- but then you kind of dig a little bit and see what kinds of software stuff interests them, what do they work on -- probably only once or twice has it been anything embedded, hardware related, close to the metal. I would need compelling evidence to change my opinion that most of the complainers have no interest in the work being done by the community they are complaining about -- and I am fully aware that a number of people have departed Linux development, but we are talking about a tiny number of the thousands of contributors over the years -- you can't please everyone.
The hobby OS, emulation and demo scene is a pretty good indicator for "natural"* gender breakdown. These tend to be tight, tiny communities or often lone wolves working on projects. It is male dominated. This can't be explained by any systemic or community gatekeeping - because there is no system nor any mandatory community for participation or distribution. Nothing prevents anyone from putting their work out there.
* I am not discounting there may be other systemic reasons that set up this condition - but it has to be societal conditions that are in place in early childhood -- something that happens a bit before one considers contributing to the Linux kernel.
sex - sure, but gender? we got plenty of females in OSS!
Still a general underrep of women.
e: Oh I see - your comment wasn't in good faith at all.
not just yours :)
It's not to say that StackOverflow is generally toxic. It is, though, unusable by beginners, and it's mostly by design. And I don't think there is a good way to communicate this to a beginner whose question has been just closed because it lacks details.
It's almost as though software development skills aren't correlated with social skills...
We have significant, documented evidence of assholes producing world changing software.
We can’t do the same for the inverse personality type, can we?
I’d rather have amazing open source free software than the validation of a blue check mark.
Not unless you discount the idea that it could be even better software if those people hadn't been turned away...
We’re down to the last 2, in house rewrites have replaced the rest with superior performing alternatives.
I would normally support pushing our clean sheet rewrites MIT, but I need a license that prohibits the addition of CoC in all derivative/downstream/forks.
In the mean time I’ll settle for a competitive advantage.
Absolutely, but the remedy is often worse than the illness. Codifying good behavior - and in particular policing language - tends to become a bureaucratic and endless black-hole project that sucks up all energy and resources, no matter the justification. There is no shortage of moralists in this world. A common misconception is that by declaring you are against toxicity, you cannot yourself be toxic. In reality, there is no such silver bullet.
Toxic behavior is either deliberate or unconscious. If you want to be an asshole, there's plenty of room within the guidelines - it thrives within wokeness, meritocracies and BDFL-run projects alike. And if you don't think you're an asshole, not even the best CoC will change your mind. There's no shortcut here, you have to confront people directly with concrete criticism, and allow them to change, or in rare cases remove them.
For instance, Linus toned his style down after realizing the effect it had on people, not from reading the sacred CoC scrolls. In fact, I have never seen or heard anyone who has meaningfully changed their behavior from a CoC.
In less censored circles, Rust has THE worst reputation of any programming language purely because of this kind of management. The entire reputation of Rust is "that language made by insane leftists... with some memory safety or something". I've never seen any language community with a worse reputation, including JS.
Meanwhile, above ground, JavaScript, Ruby, Haskell, and Scala all have worse reputations than Rust.
Like this person being the executive director? https://archive.fo/f10KK
EDIT: it's remarkable that there's none, aside of "someone said something"
Also, I would say that help-bash@ and the bash IRC channel are pretty toxic.
By "toxic" I mean that there's just a general culture of negativity, insults, hazing, and assuming the worst. There's definitely a thing where computer nerds try to one-up each other, and highly technical or obscure topics like Lisp and bash tend to bring that out.
I have a memory of comp.lang.c being pretty bad too, but I didn't participate for that long, and this was long ago.
Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)
I strongly agree. I was reading the archive of an early infosec group the other day, the culture was extremely hostile. 70% of the posts were insightful technical discussions, the remaining 30% was full of personal attacks and name callings, merely reading those posts made me want to throw my computer out of the window.
I'm not saying HN is great, but to give a sense of scale: on HN, that type of posts would be flagged to death almost immediately.
This is an interesting topic I try to stay away from here, for obvious reasons, but so many lisp communities I’ve seen seem to form around these cult of personalities or have the most, err.. eccentric members. More so than any language I’ve seen. People like to joke about Haskell programmers being cult like, but I’ve been down some really wild rabbit holes with lisp.
Ironically I recall some allegations against Hickey a while back that if true would land him in that category.
People tend to be careful with Rust because it is a relatively young language. Many medium sized business don't have much capacity to experiment but would still try it without too much convincing.
Far more relevant it access to professionals that have experience with the language. That is something that grows very slowly. The JS community is pretty "expressive", but it is still a popular choice because you find a lot of people with experience here. My boss would expect all these nerds to behave badly anyway. I doubt he will ever change his opinion but the next generation might.
Setting up little etiquette kangaroo courts with the power to arbitrate who is allowed to remain in the community is just fundamentally alienating.