On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:54 UTC (Thu) by diederich (subscriber, #26007)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I got a bit hyperactive in this discussion over on Hacker News, so I'm just going to state how I feel about this topic and let it lie.

Mr. Poettering mentioning Linus in his post is, I think, very relevant. In many ways, Linus is an archetype. I think he's pretty awesome, but there's room for improvement, and when one is in such a position as Linus, the faults get greatly magnified.

In short, in my opinion, Linus should hold himself to a rigorous standard simply because he is, whether he wants it or not, one of the most central leaders in our community.

I'll also note that his use of abusive language has definitely waned over the years, and that's very good.

Finally, before I get to my main point, I absolutely don't expect anyone to be perfect. Ideally, people who do make mistakes should try to fix them.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

Linus"

This is verbal abuse. Full stop.

In our community, verbal abuse is never a required or necessary tactic.

In our community, verbal abuse should always to be avoided.

When verbal abuse happens for whatever reason, the person who did it should retract it.

Verbal abuse harms our community more than it helps.

I defended many of these points in my Hacker News comments, but I have neither the time nor energy to do that again here.

These are my opinions; I am open to being wrong about them.

to post comments

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:18 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh no. Please not here too. Anybody who wants to continue talking about Linus's ill-advised post from 2012, this would be a more appropriate place to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415729 Note that most people in that thread are agreeing that Linus's post was ill advised.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 17:47 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Edit fail. Last sentence was supposed to read: "Note that most people in that thread are agreeing that Linus's post might have gone too far but understand how that can happen."

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:43 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] (4 responses)

> This is verbal abuse. Full stop.

Meh, I read it as just a rant about a very stupid design decision... If he had named a particular person and was really calling directly for them to be "retroactively aborted", then it would be different... But, as it is, he's just attacking an unidentified and unknown straw-author, which is really just a way of attacking the design decision itself... Literally every programmer I've ever known, including myself, has gone off on a rant just like that about some stupid design horror or another... You don't know who is really responsible for it, but you hyperbolically wish them to suffer unspeakable punishment in retaliation for their anonymous stupidity... It's not meant seriously, nor is it really aimed at any real person, just the stupid design itself... It's completely different when you know who is responsible, and you call them out by name and say such things directly aimed at them! Then, it's very likely verbal abuse... But, here, I can't really see it as anything other than attacking an anthropomorphism of a stupid design...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 5:04 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (3 responses)

It is certainly abuse but I perceive no threat in it. Without threat aspect, Linus's rants tend to be just colorful and amusing. This is all, of course, PR nightmare stuff -- if you want to make the case that Linus is a deranged psychopath, then just collect half dozen of his rants in one post and insinuate some ugly facts about his person, and call it a day.

Linus seems to have said that he believes his use of language is justified and correct, and any problems are at audience's end. This is a point that one can debate. I can not see any general solution to problems of miscommunication -- sometimes the speaker was unclear, sometimes the receiver imposed meaning that was not correct.

This society seems to favor the idea that speaker must always be very careful and if words are misunderstood, it is the speaker's responsibility. It is probably appropriate in mass media situation where there is one speaker and millions of receivers, and such messages must be crafted with care. On the other hand, human social behavior in a mailing list -- while technically viewable to public -- is hardly the sort of public broadcast where utmost care is required.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 5:07 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Generally true but if you are a leader with a community or generally a well known personality, you got to essentially treat your posts as mass media communication. yes, this is a significant burden but that is part of the role you are playing.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 11:12 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

> It is certainly abuse

But, of whom? An anonymous person? I still maintain it's just abuse of a personification of bad code... The target of the attack isn't a real person, but the stupid coding design... I'm not sure I'm worried about code being verbally abused... Lord knows I've cursed out my fair share over the decades!

I see what he said there to be roughly the same as saying, "Who was the moron who thought gets() was a great function to include in the standard library?? I hope whoever they are, they get eaten by wolves!"... It's not really attacking any real person; it's inventing an imaginary person which personifies the bad code in question and attacking that, and doing so in an obviously hyperbolic and non-serious manner...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 13:35 UTC (Thu) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

Sir, if you believe that a deranged psychopath can be recognized from a handful of cherry-picked mailing-list postings, then I've got a nice bridge to sell to you.

Sheesh. Would a spot of medium-awareness inflame your haemorrhoids?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 16:26 UTC (Fri) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

This is verbal abuse. Full stop.

This begs the question of whether there can be abuse without an actual person being the target of the words conveyed. Linus' 2012 rant was about some anonymous person. It was not directed at Kay. Kay understood this and participated in the humor - see https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/7/80. In context, this doesn't look like abuse at all, just colorful language relating to bad code.

I think you're going to have a hard time finding anyone who this was actually e-mailed to who took any offense to it.