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While civil conversation is generally important, trying to be overly nice in some ways can make it worse. The trick is to detect the point of the message and n

While civil conversation is generally important, trying to be overly nice in some ways can make it worse. The trick is to detect the point of the message and not get offended. The larger a project gets, the quicker it is needed to root out some things. Good projects are not democracies. A leader isn't going to get everything right, but accepting everything is probably worse. I think in many environments people DO want to be more blunt, but because they are representing an employer, they feel they cannot. And this sometimes leads to compromise and less desirable results. When everything is communicated in exactly the same "business professional" tone, you have effectively reduced the bit depth. The way you deal with things is by being logical and having supporting evidence, but I don't believe communities have to be for everyone and work for everyone. They should accept all groups of people, but if some people take energy out of the project, the project should get to decide where it wants to go. While I like being nice, I think if you are not occasionally very blunt. So there's a spectrum. It's a spectrum I think you can understand better if you've run a project with a couple hundred or more contributors. You have to preserve your energy. Still, I'd prefer to see language limited and highly offensive things shouldn't be said. But it's a spectrum. Quality is most important relative to making everyone feel like they 'have a voice'. Linus is doing extremely well for containing it. If some maintainers are doing worse things, that needs to be addressed. Problems come up when there are choke points where a lot of people want to contribute to the same thing, and that is naturally going to cause conflict -- or something like OpenStack, where it just says yes to everything and gets all confused :) We've become a society that gets offended a bit too much. A nd as such, we say less offensive things, and read subtexts into small things, to the point where everything sounds offensive. It's a downward spiral to where all communication has no bit depth.

pron 11y ago
> When everything is communicated in exactly the same "business professional" tone, you have effectively reduced the bit depth. That Linus calls any attempt at civility "bourgeois mores" or something like that doesn't make it so. No one is calling for the same "business professional" tone. Just for basic civility. You can be a little rude, just don't go overboard. > The way you deal with things is by being logical and having supporting evidence, but I don't believe communities have to be for everyone and work for everyone. Again, this is the response I'd expect if someone called for mandatory uniforms. Here someone is just asking them to be itsy-bitsy-slightly less dickish. To tone down their dickishness. To go from being total dicks to being normal dicks. Ah, but who decides what is a normal, acceptable amount of dickishness? This is actually quite simple: common sense, combined with listening to what members of the community say (sprinkled with a well deserved apology here and there). And when common sense doesn't cut it any more, there is a need for rules. Namely, the exact same way every reasonably functioning society that wished to be anything less than a total asshole-heaven has done since the dawn of civilization has done it.

pron 11y ago

> When everything is communicated in exactly the same "business professional" tone, you have effectively reduced the bit depth. That Linus calls any attempt at civility "bourgeois mores" or something like that doesn't make it so. No one is calling for the same "business professional" tone. Just for basic civility. You can be a little rude, just don't go overboard. > The way you deal with things is by being logical and having supporting evidence, but I don't believe communities have to be for everyone and work for everyone. Again, this is the response I'd expect if someone called for mandatory uniforms. Here someone is just asking them to be itsy-bitsy-slightly less dickish. To tone down their dickishness. To go from being total dicks to being normal dicks. Ah, but who decides what is a normal, acceptable amount of dickishness? This is actually quite simple: common sense, combined with listening to what members of the community say (sprinkled with a well deserved apology here and there). And when common sense doesn't cut it any more, there is a need for rules. Namely, the exact same way every reasonably functioning society that wished to be anything less than a total asshole-heaven has done since the dawn of civilization has done it.