On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 1:23 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I'm really disappointed in LWN for this article. While I do appreciate the idea of excluding the vilest of people from our community, I think this sets up a mentality that everyone we *do* consider part of our community is somehow off the hook. "Oh, the harassers aren't part of our community; they don't write code."

That is fundamentally untrue, and a look at some of the histories of major incidents in the tech and Open Source communities shows plenty of such incidents involving developers.

By all means, let's highlight some of the better parts of our community and how we should treat people, and let's do everything we can to get toxic people *out* of our community. However, let's not make the mistake of thinking that we don't have any to begin with, or that there's some fundamental line of niceness that divides our community from the "outsiders" who heap abuse and harassment on others. There's an ugly spectrum from tolerating verbal and written abuse and tolerating harassment and threats, and the line between the two is not nearly as bright as we might hope.

Making Lennart's complaint entirely about the threats and videos and sockpuppets ignores the pervasive culture of accepting (and cheering or laughing at) casual nastiness from developers and others who *are* unquestionably part of our current community. It's pretty easy to find examples of that; hardly a month goes by without multiple such incidents on LKML alone. Yet we excuse or support that, and reserve our condemnation for people we see as outside our community, despite the well-documented process of escalation from one behavior to the other.

Such escalation is noted in this very article: "threats by a prominent developer to circulate fabricated quotes in an attempt to destroy credibility". But hey, the people who do that kind of thing aren't part of our community.

I would recommend reading Kathy Sierra's article in more detail, before saying things like "best thing to do is to ignore them". In particular, read the sections about escalation.

These are problems we need to *fix*, not dodge. Let's not point to the most visible fires as the only problem, and ignore the gasoline-soaked environment we're all working in. Let's push for a community where *any* abuse stands out like a sore thumb and is not tolerated.

to post comments

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 3:06 UTC (Thu) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link] (23 responses)

> I would recommend reading Kathy Sierra's article in more detail, before saying things like "best thing to do is to ignore them". In particular, read the sections about escalation.

I read Kathy's article just before coming here.

It was hard to read. Kathy's insistence that everyone be nice to each other was a huge positive for the groups she was part of. It's clear that she cares deeply about what people think of each other, and of her. But the conclusion I came to after reading her blog entry is this very attribute makes the internet a toxic place for people like Kathy. Toxic in the sense that it damages them in a very real way. Toxic because it targets something they can't just turn off - caring. And toxic in a way that can't be fixed - the internet's open nature means excluding people like Weev is impossible.

Lennart Poettering complaint's aren't all that different Kathy's. All the elements are there - abuse, threats, lies. But unlike Kathy, Lennart continues to function well in the environment. I don't want to be unkind to Lennart, but my guess is this is because he doesn't posses the depth of empathy Kathy obviously has.

Similarly I read this from our editor:

> The experience has not always been pleasant; it has included abuse, federal lawsuits, and, recently, threats by a prominent developer to circulate fabricated quotes in an attempt to destroy credibility.

Same thing again, same result as Lennart. Reading it after reading Kathy's blog gave me a sense of déjà vu.

Our editor says he handles this by ignoring it. You imply that can't be true given Kathy's story, where ignoring it failed. But my guess is Kathy's world is the way it is because deep down she is incapable of ignoring it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 4:10 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I think it is very easy to say until someone will face a similar experience to realize there is a much deeper problem.
What does it show to future FOSS contributors? The inability to deal with a root cause by ignore it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 4:20 UTC (Thu) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link] (2 responses)

I find your post difficult to understand, so I freely admit that I could be taking your last sentence very much out of context:

> But my guess is Kathy's world is the way it is because deep down she is incapable of ignoring it.

If I'm understanding this sentence right, this sounds like blaming the victim. And is it really at all reasonable to expect Kathy to be able to ignore threats [1] to her family?

[1] No real citation here. @seriouspony is gone from Twitter, Kathy's blog post is somewhat rambling and very hard to follow without context, and most of Wikipedia's citations are either dead links or incoherent. Nonetheless, either there were no serious threats (which I find hard to believe) or there were, and the problem here is the threats, not Kathy's inability to ignore them.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 6:13 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

I don't think "she is incapable of ignoring [threats]" is meant as "blaming the victim".
I read it so that we should not expect that everybody is able to ignore such "attacks".

Alex

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:30 UTC (Thu) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

I'm not sure it counts as blaming the victim to suggest that they have *too much* empathy... However, it would also be good if the solution were better than "people need to learn to care less about things".

Gerv

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:22 UTC (Thu) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link] (6 responses)

> Our editor says he handles this by ignoring it. You imply that can't be true given Kathy's story, where ignoring it failed. But my guess is Kathy's world is the way it is because deep down she is incapable of ignoring it.

Highlighted quote "_incapable_ of ignoring it".

I think there is a huge difference between _incapable_ and _unwilling_.

I don't think the (relative) low rate of women in tech (or FOSS) is about their incapability of ignoring abuse as much as it is about their unwillingness to put up with it.

This industry is IMO problematic because folks in tech (or FOSS) have not yet -as a whole- agreed that someone should be able work in the industry without having to suffer systematic threats and abuse. Really. How many industries are there where folks still debate whether systematic abuse is something that should be allowed to happen?

(seriously, even here on LWN -a pretty civil site-, check the comments every time there is an article about preventing harassment on software conferences).

PS: I do see a big difference between (i) " abuse, federal lawsuits" or threats of lying about you and (ii) threats of rape and dismemberment.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 15:38 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (5 responses)

>seriously, even here on LWN -a pretty civil site-

In all seriousness, I have to say that this statement is really only true if we add the qualifier "for a FOSS community site".

If you mostly interact with communities within the FOSS ecosystem, then LWN could indeed be considered pretty civil. Compared to other, more general communities, LWN is shockingly bad. *Shockingly*.

The standard of discourse here is appalling; it's impossible for me to go more than a couple of days of reading LWN comments without reading such disgusting personal attacks and outright lunacy that I have a hard time not responding in kind - and sometimes fail to stop myself, though I think I've been getting better at this. Given the way these things tend to spiral here, It's pretty clear I'm not the only one.

I genuinely credit the LWN community with a major dip in my (sadly precarious) mental health a few years ago. Unfortunately, I seem to lack the self-control required to read the articles without reading the comments.

Nobody ever really wants to talk about this, and in most cases I suspect it's because they genuinely don't see it. I mean, if you spend your days reading debian-devel or - god forbid - debian-user, LWN probably seems like a wondrous haven in comparison; if you interact with a variety of online communities that aren't FOSS-associated in any way, it's a very different picture. The problem is so endemic in FOSS circles that you really need to spend a fair bit of time outside to notice just how bad things are here.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 19:09 UTC (Mon) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (2 responses)

> Compared to other, more general communities, LWN is shockingly bad. *Shockingly*.

Mind if I ask for specifics on what sorts of online communities you're thinking of when you say this?

LWN is one of my very favorite sites, and I don't have experience with many other communities, but upon reflection I do admit there have been more insults thrown around here (though I only remember one aimed at me personally) than my other favorite sites, a couple of adventure game forums and GamingOnLinux. I suspect the only reason GamingOnLinux is more civil is that the moderator delete hammer is applied quickly whenever somebody starts resorting to insults and personal attacks.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 0:44 UTC (Tue) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link]

> > Compared to other, more general communities, LWN is shockingly bad.
> > *Shockingly*.

> Mind if I ask for specifics on what sorts of online communities you're
> thinking of when you say this?

I too wonder a bit about what people are using as a basis of comparison.

I think many of the old timers around here, when making comparisons, are possibly going the whole way back to USENET and BBSes.

Back then the idea of finding another place, where you could discuss technical things with like minded people in a semi-anonymous way, was a great thing. It is true you had to put up with trolls, flame wars, and the endless Amiga/OS2 fanatics, but that was what killfiles were for.

When endless September arrived and the real world started leaking in things just never quite recovered.

It is true that with the corporate takeover of Linux and the ensuing attitude enforcement things will be much nicer for outsiders.

It's just once we get a world where Linus is always cheerful, Al Viro doesn't flame, and David Miller removes all strong language comments from the Sparc-Linux sources, I feel something will be lost. Maybe it is the destiny of everything to leave its wild-west roots. I always used Linux because it was fun; I feel like the push for universal blandness is just making things boring and I've found myself losing interest in Linux development, something I hadn't really thought was possible.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 13:39 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>> Compared to other, more general communities, LWN is shockingly bad. *Shockingly*.
>Mind if I ask for specifics on what sorts of online communities you're thinking of when you say this?

I'm mostly thinking of gaming communities - the ones I interact with (like Civilization) are somewhat skewed more in favour of adult participants versus the more console-oriented areas that have to deal with things like this gamergate nonsense.

Also, other hobbyist communities, principally related to electronics, such as Arduino/wearables/assorted open hardware initiatives, plus recently some more traditional analogue electronics.

One thing most of these have in common is *some* degree of moderation, which is commonly hated by the ultra-libertarian elements of the FOSS community (where this ideology is unusually prevalent), but which appears to be a practical necessity in growing a community past a certain size when none of the participants can ever see each other's faces (seeing each other's faces acts like a natural form of moderation IRL, especially in combination with the impermanence of the spoken word).

There doesn't usually need to be *much* moderation though: the maker community seems to be generally very good, even with very little visible moderation. The gaming communities I suspect could devolve more easily, but in practice even very little light moderation is generally enough so long as it is consistent and has well-defined rules.

Moderation is a lot easier to get right if it's baked in to the system from the start, because then you're not trying to get people to *change*, but to behave in a certain way in the first place. It also only works when it is transparent (eg there is an explicit 'post removed/edited by ...') and the moderators are actually good at it - don't act emotionally, are specific about why they are taking some action, and are polite. The latter is extremely important, and I'm not just talking about using polite *words*, which many people seem to feel is enough, but being *genuinely* polite: just because you insulted somebody without using the word 'fucking', it is no less of an insult. Somebody whose post is being moderated should never be made to feel like they are being victimised because it's counter-productive.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 0:50 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think I can agree with this.

There are other sites I pay attention to which don't constitute "FOSS community sites" and yet are well into the "hive of scum and villainy" category

• 4chan (particularly /b/ but really most channels that have anyone actually writing rather than just dumping images, even /ck/ has plenty of racism and just completely out of place arguments and name calling)

• Reddit (presumably there are sub-reddits that are full of calm polite people and I just don't read any of those)

• Moo Bunny (a freeform pseudonymous forum which has at least two separate individuals posting endless obscenity in an apparent attempt to render it useless)

• Youtube comments for almost anything or anyone popular

• Something Awful (at least some parts of it)

And there are also a whole bunch of sites that, if they aren't clearly _worse_ than LWN are certainly not significantly _better_ such as

• RationalWiki's "saloon bar" forum

• OS News

• The major Amiga web forums (Amigaworld. Amiga.org, etc.) because there's nothing so bitterly fought over as the last crumbs of the cake

• Slashdot (if you still read it you probably have threshold set to +2 and still ignore most of what's written, but try -1 because that's a fairer comparison to unfiltered LWN.net)

• The official (moderated) forums for the MMO World of Warcraft.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 28, 2014 23:40 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

If your goal is just to be "better than 4chan" (or even "better than RationalWiki") then your goal is really not ambitious enough...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:23 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (3 responses)

> Our editor says he handles this by ignoring it.

(a) Some abuse IS best ignored. It's from somebody having a 'moment'.
(b) Some abuse can be dealt with. Somebody needs to level up as a human being and try being an adult.
(c) Some abuse is insane. No amount of (a) or (b) is going to fix what requires profession medical help.
(d) Some abuse is systematic. Someone is being diabolical in support of a nefarious goal. You may need to lawyer up.

There may be other categories, but the point is that it's a spectrum. (a) puts you in a 'first, do no harm' mode, which minimizes the fees and apologies later. As a default choice, this is hard to argue against.

The sticky wicket is positioning the abuse along the spectrum at the appropriate time. Overall, I submit this is not a solvable problem. The best you can do is think through your responses to each beforehand, and deal with the abuse in context.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 15:57 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

This was very well put. And *none* of the responses you mention are "victim-blaming", IMO.

+1 for "Turn the other cheek"

Posted Oct 14, 2014 4:04 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

Very well put. I'm a big fan of (a), particularly when it comes to online abuse, but I will freely admit that's probably a function of my "online upbringing" consisting principally of BBSs and heavy IRC[1] usage. And as anyone who spent a good deal of time on those can tell you, those mediums had/have a lot of trolling -- to which the "turn the other cheek" response usually works beautifully.

[1] I'm not talking Freenode here either, as folks there are generally civilized. I'm thinking more of some of the, uh, less-well-focused parts of DALnet and EFnet.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 28, 2014 23:21 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Your ontology doesn't scale; it only deals with abusers as isolated individuals, while the problem with online abuse is that it becomes normalized across whole communities. I think this article gives a more useful perspective: http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/abuse-as-ddos

(Or for a more personal view, the author of that piece has also written recently about why they have quit participating in tech publically: http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/10/10/life-and-times-of-...)

There's no way for a single individual to usefully defend themselves against DDOS abuse; the only defense is a distributed effort across the community to define cultural norms saying that these things are not okay and to enforce those norms against the jerks who try to stir things up anyway. If you see someone being attacked, don't just abandon them to deal with it themselves; help them out.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 17:45 UTC (Thu) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> But my guess is Kathy's world is the way it is because deep down she is incapable of ignoring it.

I think the real reason is mentioned in the article of Kathy:

> You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly.

If the law enforcement agencies can't be bothered to enforce the law, the society breaks down. If the citizens of the USA don't take action to compel the agencies to uphold the law, this will only go worse.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 2:35 UTC (Fri) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (6 responses)

Lennart Poettering complaint's aren't all that different Kathy's. All the elements are there - abuse, threats, lies. But unlike Kathy, Lennart continues to function well in the environment. I don't want to be unkind to Lennart, but my guess is this is because he doesn't posses the depth of empathy Kathy obviously has.

Alternate theory: it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to become "hard targets" to protect themselves from sociopaths.

Women are more likely to be "soft targets" because any time the subject of learning better mental self-defence techniques is raised it's immediately followed by accusations of "victim blaming."

Those accusations and the self-censorship they provoke, of course, only serve to benefit one group.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 4:30 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (4 responses)

Innate sex differences could be at play. Women appear to be more fearful than men. This sort of thing could be because women's weaker physical strength. Evolution could drive such change by making you take potential threats more seriously.

There is also a debate involving neurochemistry here. Are people who are unable to resist temptations somehow weaker in will power, or is it just that they experience the temptations strongly? Similarly, if a person appears to be courageous in face of danger, is he brave, or just incapable of feeling appropriate level of fear?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 16:58 UTC (Mon) by b3nt0box (subscriber, #98698) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow. Arguments like that are abstract thought exercises at best.

Social influences are far more impactful on people's responses. The innate differences between the sexes that you mention sound more like rationalizing social norms than some real evolutionary diference.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 10:28 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> thought exercises at best.

NO NO NO.

My wife has Parkinson's. It upsets her perception of reality. That's basically a shortage of the nerve-signalling chemical dopamine, and it has well-recognised effects.

Testosterone makes people more aggressive, and presumably is very important both in that and in controlling peoples' response to aggression. Put two testosterone-fuelled people in a room and you probably won't get a fight, but the atmosphere will be very aggressive.

I don't know enough about oestrogen to make the equivalent comment but gender differences are very important. I suspect if you did a profiling exercise, you'd actually find are far better match of the passive/aggressive spectrum with testosterone levels than with gender, but then you find a fairly close match with testosterone levels and gender.

You can't say "individual differences are more important than gender" when gender provides a massive bias to those individual differences. You're almost certainly right to claim that gender is not a DIRECT influence, but it has a very strong second-level influence.

Which is why Lennart could shrug it all off - he's probably high testosterone. Kathy couldn't - and she could well have had less testosterone than the average female. (Which is why some - high testosterone - women don't have any difficulty coping.)

(And it wouldn't surprise me if many of these assholes are beta or gamma males - they're high-testosterone in the company of an even-higher testosterone individual.)

Cheers,
Wol

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 15:51 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Testosterone makes people more aggressive

Nope. Aggression *causes* increased testosterone production, so they are strongly correlated, however testosterone does *not* cause aggression.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 16:02 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Threaten someone's children and you'll probably trigger an aggressive response, even -- perhaps especially -- if female. (Of course, women do have some circulating testosterone, just as men have circulating oestrogen, but the levels are *much* lower.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 28, 2014 23:39 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Seriously? WTF is your suggestion for "better mental self-defence techniques" that will fix the problems of being suddenly (a) unemployable, and (b) receiving a constant stream of credible threats of violence against your family? Will "better mental self-defence" make the police take these kinds of things seriously? (They don't.) Will "better mental self-defence" magically make employers stop believing slanderous rumours about what a "slut" someone is? As Kathy Sierra documents, her main troll was widely celebrated by tech luminaries after admitting what he'd done.

Women get attacked harder then men (because it's easy to find men willing to dogpile on women online), and they're softer targets because the *people around them don't back them up*.

(And anyway, I get why being a stone-cold hardass is a reasonable requirement if you want to be, like, a marine or something, but why is it a reasonable requirement for writing init systems or writing chatty blog posts about learning Java?)

(Oh right, and on your other point: the reason you get accused of "victim blaming" is because you make arguments like this that are based entirely on your vague impressions of how things work and ignoring a bunch of well-documented facts you can't be bothered to read about, and then somehow come to the erroneous conclusion that the *major* problem is something that the victim should have differently, like improve their "mental self-defence". I.e., you're blaming victims for not controlling things that are outside their control. It's a pretty simple and descriptive term really; it only sounds like some Machiavellian ploy because you can't be arsed to learn how uninformed you are. The result isn't "censorship" any more than it's censorship to suggest that people might want to slow down before suggesting on LKML that the kernel would be much more awesome if they rewrote it in JavaScript, or that if you go ahead anyway then you might be disappointed by the response.)