Community faults [LWN.net]

Community faults

Posted Sep 26, 2007 21:25 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Community faults by peace
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

LWN is a site about people writing things that others read. There are published conventions for this activity, just as there are published code conventions for the thousands of software projects out there; but these ones have been available for centuries. I don't think it is enough to say "I am dyslexic" or "I am a foreigner", since you are obviously not trying hard enough and just hiding behind the "dyslexic" label.

And yet most people here are polite enough to ignore such matters, and to keep a civil tone; this makes me quite proud to support it, actually. These people (who have taken the work to learn how to spell) might say "use your brain and RTFLexicon", but they choose to be constructive and listen to you anyway. This attitude would be very useful on some developer lists I have seen.

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Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 4:01 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

You may not be put off by this sort of thing, but to suggest that others shouldn't be is suggesting that they fit a mold if they want to participate. I see it in a more straightforward manner. By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them. With no terribly good argument for why the offensive guys are going to be better programmers, I'd prefer that the people with the choice modify their behaviour so the people with less choice get to participate as well.

Of course, if you want to behave in a way that reduces the number of potential developers, feel free. You'll have to convince people as to why the community as a whole will benefit from that, of course.

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 17:59 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them.

You left out the third part:

"People also have little control whether something is going to upset or offend someone else"

Some people are very easily offended.

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 18:21 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Indeed. Some people are excessively easily offended. That doesn't imply that everyone who is offended by something is over-sensitive.

In any case, the same basic argument still stands. Your first interaction with someone may offend them. That gives you a better understanding of where their thresholds are, and you can choose to modify your behaviour to reduce the probability of offending them in future. It may be that the compromises you'd have to make are excessive (if "You're failing to acquire this lock before modifying this data structure, which could lead to unexpected behaviour" ends up offending them, for instance), in which case it's probably better to just tell them that and avoid interacting with them in future.

Not everyone is able to accept constructive criticism, and those who aren't are unlikely to make especially useful contributions to the free software world. But that's not the same set of people as the ones who can accept constructive criticism but are put off by hostility. Losing the latter because you don't think we should deal with the former isn't a sensible tradeoff.

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 8:53 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Besides, I have seen the conventions here and I think I fit right in.

The conventions I referred to, in case it is not obvious, are called "grammar" and "orthography" (or "spelling"). Some people stick to them more strictly than you do (not me, though).

As long as someone has a point, in the end, thats what matters.

Well said. Contrast this with what you said before about code contributions:

"If your submitting to a project and can't get something as trivial as coding style right than you probably deserve to be ridiculed".

People might paraphrase your latter contribution: "As long as someone has good ideas, in the end, that is what matters. Not everyone is going to fit the code conventions you prefer", and it would still be reasonable. Code is the expression of an idea, just as common language.

What we are requesting is the same level of civility in development mailing lists as on LWN. There is no reason to behave differently.

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 14:49 UTC (Thu) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

What I'm getting at is this: is Free software going to be able to include the grungy dirty smelly realities of humanity or is it going to require a certain esoteric social etiquette defined largely by the dominant main stream culture, likely all white and docile. Technology was largely driven by social out casts of all flavors. Now that it's main stream are we only going to accept bathed vanilla?

man_ls, I've been responding to several of your posts here, please don't think I'm picking on your handle :). You may be referring to very specific instances of abusive behavior or even a certain class of abuse and I would likely agree that those cases were unfortunate.

I *am* responding more generally to a certain trend of gentrification of the tech ghetto you might say. I don't really have it fully worked out but I do know that geek, hacker and nerd do not mean what they used to.

If you have any foll up thoughts I'd appreciate reading them. I'm going to give this thread a rest, though... I'm sure we'll meet again, muhaha!

Kind Regards