Sick indeed
Sick indeed
Posted Oct 14, 2014 9:26 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Sick indeed by man_ls
Parent article: On the sickness of our community
It is the leaders of a community who very often set the tone for the rest. If a community leader comes across as an arrogant asshole, this tells other people in the community that (a) it is OK to be an arrogant asshole in that community and (b) this is what the leader does so if you want to be more like him or her then try to emulate that. Conversely, if the leaders emphatically aren't arrogant assholes then that gives the community the required leverage to tell any other arrogant assholes to cut it out.
The problem is that, especially in free-software projects, if the project leaders foster a culture of arrogant assholery it is very difficult for others in the community to tell them to tone it down, since (a) they're usually the ones who first came up with the project and do most of the work, and (b) since they're arrogant assholes they generally don't like to be told how to behave, especially by incompetent wimps who are too stupid to see how the leaders walk on water, and ought to get out of the kitchen if they can't stand the heat. Often the community contains a crowd of sub-assholes who, simply to show off their own prowess at being arrogant assholes, will gang up on and incinerate anyone putting forward the concept that perhaps it might be bad to be an arrogant asshole. This drives away the more reasonable people and thus makes the problem self-reinforcing.