In my personal experience such statements are actually not rare among specific minorities, and only in spaces between those minorities. They will never be said in a public way, because it makes them targets. I've been pulled aside by fellow minorities and warned against communities I had expressed interest in in the past, always in private in confidential spaces.

But what you're saying is that people will disagree about what communities are "toxic and non-serious". I might think that, e.g. much of the blockchain space easily matches that sort of description, but it would be harder to say whether that's a majority or minority viewpoint.

The fact that people disagree is a reason to not have moderation... why?

Because it's good for people to have and to share diverse opinions. The point of moderation is to prevent fringe elements from ruining something for everyone else, not to enforce homogeneity where consensus has yet to be formed.

I openly advise my students to stay away from posting questions on StackOverflow and ask for help among their peers and teachers. At least until they're able to clearly grasp what the "Minimal Complete Verifiable Example" is, how to minimize code, and how to google problems with slight variations, which are not easy skills.

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.

Oh, I think they are not as rare as you think. People are actively deterred from, say, Linux kernel development because of the community.

Yet the kernel is one of the most successful OSS projects of all time. I'm not sure it makes your point very well.

Turns out asshole can make good software!

It's almost as though software development skills aren't correlated with social skills...

Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev.

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.

> Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev.

Not unless you discount the idea that it could be even better software if those people hadn't been turned away...

have you seen a thread discussing OCaml recently?

no, link?

OpenBSD

Have you ever tried learning PHP? Even the people that don’t actively work with it are toxic :P