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This is *not* (only) about prettynessThis is *not* (only) about prettynessPosted Mar 13, 2013 20:01 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: This is *not* (only) about prettyness by tpo Parent article: Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience
I know this might be difficult for some of us in this community, because we have our "tact filters" installed backwards when we were built at the factor....
If this were a face-to-face conversation, and someone expressed disappointment with another person's decision making, the person receiving the complaint could easily be genuinely sorry that the decision made the other person unhappy and trying to express that. If you could see Mo's facial expression, body language and could hear the tone of her voice you could know whether or not this was meant as a genuine attempt to show either sympathy and/or empathy.
Text as a medium is very difficult when it comes to handling emotive language, or the things you humans call "feelings". It's very difficult to know for sure if the person making an emotive statement is doing so in a genuine fashion or is being patronizing or dismissive. Its just as easy to read both sides of the conversation as trollish regardless of either person's intent.
Unfortunately we tend to project our out state of mind when we read these sort of conversations. If we are angry or upset, we will read responses as if they were intended to be angry or upset. We don't of correlating tone and body language context to help us sort it out.
Be wary, and give everyone the benefit of the doubt with regard to emotional intent.
-jef
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This is *not* (only) about prettyness Posted Mar 14, 2013 8:47 UTC (Thu) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]
I don't agree with this. It's as hard in the real world as it is with text to figure out if somebody is being sarcastic or honest. Usually what we rely on is a bunch of unwritten rules for communication, and those exist for online communication just as they exist for face-to-face.
The only reason why you (and I) didn't read it as a passive-aggressive trolling comment was because we know the person who wrote the comment. Because it said "duffy" and not "slashdot".
This is *not* (only) about prettyness Posted Mar 14, 2013 15:22 UTC (Thu) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
I disagree, and agree very much with Jef. We'll end up being in a pretty bad place if the default interpretation of something that can easily be interpreted as genuinely nice becomes sarcastic and dismissive.
I don't want to be in this place, it helps nobody.
I do want to be in a place where you can express being personally sorry when disagreeing over a technical issue without being mistaken for a sarcastic disk who just wants to pour some extra salt into the wound.
Being friendly is not a bad thing at all, in fact it's often missing in the discourse in Free software communities, and probably makes quite some people stay away, or leave, because they just don't possess the time and energy to put up with discouragement.
In KDE (and a few other communities I know of), this has even been codified in a code of conduct, read for example http://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct/ or, maybe more relevant here, Fedora's: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct (although the latter is not very clear on this assume-positive directive).
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