Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 14, 2010 19:12 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Same old story, only in a different community... by giraffedata
Parent article: Of hall monitors and slippery slopes

I've been at the receiving end of repeated "I don't understand why..." -- and yes, it's an effective deterrent. Initially, I thought I had not made myself clear, but when it continued year after year I learned that all it meant was "I don't want to understand". It is very hard, even impossible to make yourself understood to someone who starts, at the beginning of reading your argument, with composing a reply in his head that begins "I don't understand". It's rhetoric -- and it's effective. It's also completely false, and often the hallmark of poisonous people in a project.

In other words, telling someone you didn't understand them is not polite: it's telling them they are too stupid to make themselves clear. Though that might be a cultural thing, of course.

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Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 15, 2010 12:15 UTC (Sat) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014) [Link] (6 responses)

Indeed, there's a /major/ difference between a) once-in-a-while "I don't see/understand why [...]" and b) years of repeated "I don't see/understand why" when replying to users and other developers who back their wishes (and sometimes even tentative patches) with arguments from the other side of the coin.
a) is polite (especially if explicitly followed by ~"please explain more / better / differently"), b) means "I don't want to understand".

Obstructive behaviour ("I don't want to understand", actively disregarding user input, tearing down a number of ideas and patches with "it's useless" - while the very fact that someone has spent the time to make changes to the code and submit them means that these changes _are_ useful to someone; etc.) is very bad when the person repeatedly writing such statements is one of the decision-makers of the community...
(Nowadays, it would be nearer from the facts to say that Kevin _was_ a decision-maker, given that he has done little in the way of productive changes for more than two years...)

I've been made aware of a number of occurrences of Kevin behaving in Fedora like he behaves in the TI-68k community, e.g.:
* trolling on redundant topics, which ended up getting him the CMake extremist and Sam the autotools extremist threatened twice with moderation (they disregarded the first warning): https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-Ju... , dozens of mails whose title contains "an update to automake-1.11?";
* flaming down using a destructive tone (the opinion itself is valid, but "completely braindead crap" is a terribly obnoxious choice of words): https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-Oc... . So did Ulrich Drepper ("for a problem that doesn't exist. I don't see why people even spend a second thinking about this.").

I have also been made aware that some people in the Fedora community have realized things about Kevin that many of us in the TI community have realized for years, e.g.:
* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/... : Kevin's inability to accept wishes different from his (obviously, in the TI-68k community, it was more about e.g. "_nostub vs. kernel" and "size optimization vs. speed optimization" than "KDE vs. Gnome" or "Fedora vs. other distros"). The mail was complete with a useful suggestion on how to improve his behaviour for the common good.
* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/... ("you seem to have no skills for actually promoting cooperation and understanding between different groups of people." !)

Among other persons, I have already explained Kevin multiple times how he could have worded some of his thoughts in a much more polite way, and I have also explained him one of the useful life lessons given by one of my schoolmates, about being predictable and being all too quick to react to trolling. All of this was to no avail, since it's abundantly clear that Kevin is mad enough to keep screwing up, both in the TI community and (that is a much more serious issue) in one of the highest profile FLOSS projects out there !
I just strongly hope, for his sake and for ours, that Kevin at last realizes how awful his behaviour is, and fixes it before it's too late (before even more people are severely unhappy with him in the Fedora community - but also before an ill-intentioned person exploits his high predictability and his inability to think differently to put him in an uneasy situation IRL). "Only time will tell".

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 16, 2010 22:14 UTC (Sun) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't understand why you're using the LWN comments section to vent your frustrations with this individual. Please go do it elsewhere.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 13:32 UTC (Mon) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014) [Link] (4 responses)

If the only thing you can see in my comments is "venting my frustrations", then you're missing the point and the issues raised - Kevin's style ;)

See, it's not out of sheer pleasure that I'm posting here. There's a goal. I'm doing this because for the common good of both of our communities, and for his own sake, there _needs_ to be a change in Kevin's behaviour. Kevin needs to be taught many lessons about human behaviour, respect and cooperativeness. Not to mention common sense - he complains about the FESCo lacking common sense, but well...
Drawing lines between people, trolling on redundant topics and thought exercises not backed by significant facts (here, what would happen if Fedora's update process became more conservative or less conservative) is no good. We're talking about FLOSS here, a model where federating people towards a common goal is important. Kevin _needs_ to use his time and skills (as I already wrote, he _is_ capable) in a much more useful way. Adam Miller, too, wrote him something along those lines.
But given that nearly 10 years of conflicts (with, once in a while, explanations on how to improve his behaviour coming from multiple persons, as I've stressed) in the TI communities haven't fixed Kevin's behaviour, and that he's using the same kind of ways in the Fedora community, I feel that remaining mute is at best inefficient, at worst damaging. We TI community left Kevin the chance of a fresh start with a different set of people - but was it the best thing we could have done, after all ?

I know first-hand what it takes to radically alter behaviour. As I mentioned above, I did it myself, after finding out about a number of facts (IRC chan logs, etc.) that shed a very different light about the respective behaviour of Kevin and the others (compared to the way Kevin presented, or hid, those facts). The results of acknowledging my errors and fixing my behaviour (working collaboratively with more people, being hated by many less persons, etc.) have been highly positive. Seriously.

I don't have such pride as thinking that my several posts in that thread will yield significant changes. But at least, I'll have _tried_ to open a few more eyes...
The thing is, we TI community know Kevin much better than you do. Kevin's bright side comes to sight first, but sooner or later comes the dark side. For one example, Kevin made the feat of getting banned from the main TI-68k French-speaking message board, due to severely impolite and insulting behaviour of publicly rejoicing about a database problem and wishing that the message board would not come back online. What made that disrespectful comment even more crazy was that he attended that message board a lot...
It's extremely hard to get banned from there, even polluting dozens of topics with redundant trolls doesn't make the cut. And needless to say, during his ban, which was lifted later, the tone on that message board was much more civil...

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 13:35 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

Whatever the point may be, I think you've more than made it by now. Maybe this would be a good time to stop?

Thanks.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 15:37 UTC (Mon) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (2 responses)

Are you hall-monitoring this discussion?

Why yes! I do like irony, don't you?

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 20, 2010 14:52 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (1 responses)

He also happens to be the owner of this particular website. What's ironic about encouraging decent behavior on your own turf?

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 20, 2010 15:45 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The article is about Fedora moderating some threads on its sites.