16 ms·

Choosing to stay out of the community

242 points by pulisse 8y ago

solotronics 8y ago
It comes across as elitist to keep code fixes in your own private repository to 'punish' those you don't agree with. The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree with?
- wrkronmiller 8y ago
  I doubt the motive is to punish, but is instead to avoid the unwanted drama of dealing with a "toxic" community.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I think the point is, whenever I fork a piece of code, fix something, and push the fix back upstream, there’s a whole set of things I apparently didn’t do to the maintainers liking. I don’t want to deal with that...
  - Scaevolus 8y ago
    My favorite is when they demand you write tests for a three-line change to code that has no tests.
    - Thiez 8y ago
      In their defence, deciding you're going to require new tests for all new additions in a pretty effective way to get out of the 'there are no tests' situation. I recently heard something along the lines of "don't bother adding new tests, this project barely has any tests anyway" about a project where I have been trying to increase test coverage whenever I have to make a change in recent months. With that attitude it's no surprise the project barely had any tests... Naturally it is not a reasonable request when there is no existing testing infrastructure yet.
- geofft 8y ago
  > The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. Whose point is this? It is not the point of the free software movement as seen by the FSF, which calls the APSL 1.x non-free because it requires you to publish changes https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-apsl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-apsl.html , nor of the (largely similar) free software movement as seen by Debian, which has a "dissident test" that explicitly requires you have the option of keeping changes among your trusted friends (assuming you trust them not to republish, of course) https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html . It is certainly not the point of the open-source movement nor the Linux Foundation, both of which are firmly supportive of companies making internal improvements and not publishing any of them. If it is your point, I urge you to reconsider a position that focuses on individuals not publishing code instead of corporations not publishing code.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- sandov 8y ago
  Except that sometimes "those you don't agree with" don't really care about the repo, they just want to push their political agenda. Other times your conscience might feel cleaner just knowing that you aren't part of a group that does things you don't like, for example: discrimination based on race. Some big projects have partnered with programs like Outreachy, that decide who to help based on the ethnicity, gender, and sexuality of the applicant. Would you feel comfortable working for a project that openly partners with the KKK to foster adoption of open source in the white supremacist community?. This is an extreme example, but I'm using it for the sake of the argument: Most of us wouldn't want to work for such a project, even though some people might be more malleable than others.
- munchbunny 8y ago
  The motive isn't to "punish." It's much more basic than that: I just don't want to deal with the toxicity of the community, and the best way to accomplish that is to not engage. Once I engage, I will probably need to spend mental cycles dealing with it. > The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. I think this is both an admirable view but also a naive one. Code is built, maintained, modified, sold, bought, and used by humans, so at the end of the day code is a human endeavor, and that means you will never escape having to deal with other humans in the process of writing code. You might have more or less pleasant interactions, but (at least before the singularity) code doesn't exist outside the context of human interactions. I've personally constantly sought ways to spend more time coding and less time dealing with people, but my efforts have only reinforced the bittersweet message that the code I write is both more effective and more useful when I engage with people more. So at some point I just embraced the human element of the craft. But that comes with managing my emotional and social energy, which also means avoiding communities I don't need to be a part of.
- itronitron 8y ago
  >> What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree with? What a wonderful world that would be.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  It's not elitist, it's just not wanting to deal with assholes. I think that is pretty understandable. That doesn't punish them it just results in not dealing with them.
  - preordained 8y ago
    This is my take. I think this goes on at all levels. I know I definitely take some roundabout paths at work from time to time to avoid people with big egos because it's just a roadblock and a time suck. Ideally, we could work together and be more efficient, but some people just don't want to play nice or fair and there are only so many hours in the day.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >It comes across as elitist to keep code fixes in your own private repository to 'punish' those you don't agree with. Throughout my life I seem to have endless arguments about this. Many people seem to have a binary view of the world (positive/negative), and many others (like me) tend to have more of a ternary view (positive/neutral/negative). No one is punishing anyone. Not helping is neutral. It is not a punishment. If I dislike what you do and decide to withdraw support I had been providing, I am not punishing you. I am merely disengaging with you. My position is the same as that of someone who never helped you and continues not to help you. And of course, as another person has pointed out. When someone gives you something with the explicit permission that you do not have to give back, it is petty to complain when they don't give back.
- dbt00 8y ago
  If freedom to share code doesn't include freedom to not share code, it's not very free, is it? The meta-point is that everybody's wringing their hands over "oh no, I can't say things I want to say and also contribute to Linux", and her point is that this is not new, lots of people have experienced this for a long time.
Myrmornis 8y ago
Really silly, mean-spirited post. Open-source software is one of the pinnacles of human culture, and it's a wonderful fact that our most capitalist economies depend on it absolutely. There is nothing impressive or honourable or wise or interesting about the sentiment expressed in the post.
- spiderfarmer 8y ago
  ..and evidently, the open source community and its products could be even more impressive if it was better at responding to criticism. You are bad at this - and that’s a problem.
  - Myrmornis 8y ago
    I'm just stating my opinion; that's essentially what this site is for. I wasn't criticized and therefore was not responding to criticism. It is true that I have little time for codes of conduct etc.
    - spiderfarmer 8y ago
      "It is true that I have little time for codes of conduct etc" That's the worst excuse for plastering the internet with low quality 'opinions' like the one above.
      - Myrmornis 8y ago
        No, the problem is that you don’t like my opinion, not that it is low quality. And that’s absolutely fine. I made two serious points in 3 sentences; the remainder was a criticism of the post. My points were about what a fascinating and positive phenomenon open source is. If you’d like I can explain them to you again.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  She seems to be implying that she has one hell of a fix for the Linux kernel, but she’s not sharing it because Linus is mean to contributors. I can’t fathom how awesome this fix must be for her to write about it twice, and she doesn’t go into any detail.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Everything you've already heard about on HN and/or your favorite this-leaning or that-leaning web site. This is a legitimate question, and I have an answer, but I don't think many people are going to like it. My response to this is to say "wow, look at how screwed up these communities are", and then tag on "just like I always suspected", and then finally I add "and that reinforces my decision to stay out of them". Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here.
- escherplex 8y ago
  Intelligent self-critical and/or masochistic penchants of the community, I'd guess :)
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  "Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here." Yeah, that was funny to think about. I've only seen so many articles. Her write-ups were mostly technical dodging politics a lot. The back and forth, downvote mobs, or whatever kick in with politics on certain topics or views due to community's biases. If she stays away from that, then she can still be really popular. Whereas, she just now admitted something that could be in the red zone for some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS. It's simultaneously a response that's understandable or folks might sympathize with for the portion that is concerned about toxic behavior in general FOSS and/or toward minority members in particular. Still a grey area in potential reaction here. I find it fascinating to watch how these things play out. Regardless, her posts about spotting problems, solving them, and keeping them from recurring were pretty awesome. Most of us will probably still respect her regardless of how much she's embracing or dodging online communities.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I don't care one iota if she does or does not participate on HN or in any other community. The only other post of hers I recall reading boiled down to her refusing to fix a thing at work that it was her responsibility to fix and wouldn't have taken very long, like a few minutes, and leaving it that way for six months, calling it "an experiment" to see if anyone else would fix it and then talking trash about everyone else at work when her boss finally told her to fix it already. It struck me as very unprofessional, childish and toxic. She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming. I'm not a programmer, so that might just be my ignorance showing. But my guess is that's the primary reason her writing shows up here so often, because it doesn't strike me as great writing overall and her attitude seems to be pretty toxic generally while she blames that on everyone else. She could make a lot of the same points she makes without pissing all over everyone in the process. She could very reasonably say "I'm a woman in tech, so I deal with brogrammers 40+ hours a week and I have no patience left to do more of that in my off hours." She could say "Eh, different strokes for different folks. I share my stuff with people I enjoy talking with and I'm okay with that meaning it isn't out there in the ether for the whole world to access. We can't all be Linux." She could make all the same choices she is currently making and describe them in her blog without gratuitously pissing all over a community that very likely accounts for a large share, perhaps even the vast majority, of her blog traffic.
peterwwillis 8y ago
I've been involved with open source communities off and on for over a decade, as well as other, non-computer communities. News flash: It's not the community that becomes toxic, it's humanity. Every community that I've ever witnessed gets toxic at some point. As in-groups grow more insular and people become more involved, they get more toxic. But the solution to this phenomenon doesn't have to be black & white. I have always stayed on the margins of communities, and still dip my toes in the water occasionally to get something done. But do I need to keep private forks of patches to avoid messy interactions? Nope. It's pretty easy to fire off a pull request or patch set and then forget about it. I'm not investing great deals of effort or emotion. I'm just sharing my crap. If they merge it, fine, if they don't, fine. But I'm certainly not keeping super secret private repos for just the cool kids to use. That would be even more involved than what little I am already.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  I like your route. Another thing to point out about just fire-and-don't-care-if-it-hits contributions is you still can take credit for them. You put your effort in, you improved the software as you see it, you benefit from that even if they don't want it, others can benefit from your fork, and (if branding) you can even highlight your improvement in CV or resume. So, you and/or others might benefit from them taking your contributions. You and/or others might still benefit when they don't. You can't control what they do anyway. So, might as well set it up so you and others can benefit either way.
  - tzs 8y ago
    Fire and forget open source can be fun if you truly forget about it, because then you can be surprised by coming across it in the wild. I wrote something in the early '90s, entirely for my own use. I thought others might find it useful, so tossed it up on my public FTP space at school, added a notice saying it was public domain, posted a single message to the appropriate Usenet group saying it was available in case anyone might find it useful, but that since it fully satisfied my needs I was not going to do any further work on it nor was I interested in any enhancements, and stopped reading that Usenet group. I few years later I noticed Red Hat included a package with the same name ("suck"). Curious, I looked to see what it did--and found it was a descendant of mine! Someone looking for something like it found mine, which did a good chunk of what they were looking for, added the parts missing for their needs, and had been maintaining and distributing it. (And I just checked...it's still in some Linux distros! It's in Debian 9, package name "suck". Too bad I've long since lost my original code. It would be interesting to see if anything of mine has survived in it).
seneca 8y ago
While I don't think her solution is the best, I can't say I disagree with the spirit of this post. With politics being dragged ever more into the software world, people attacking everyone for any perceived transgression, attempts to get people kicked out of communities, or even fired, over social media comments, you really need to consider what you're exposing yourself to by getting involved in the open source community. You would think that a community based on giving away typically very expensive effort would be more welcoming, but somehow we've ended up with this. It does seem like this is just part of some wider trend though. It's not just the software world, public communities in general seem to be destabilizing and radicalizing.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  It's not perception. It's a byproduct of a few different things. Close interaction between people of different social classes, lack of faith in governmental institutions, massive changes in labor markets, and in the U.S. in particular massive disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and archaic voting and representation laws.
village-idiot 8y ago
When shit started hitting the fan with the Linux CoC, my boss indicated that it was a shame that the CoC was being used as a tool for political revenge. My response was to wonder why there were so many grudges? The CoC is for certain acting like gasoline on a fire, but I don’t believe it was the spark. Glad I never really bothered to try interacting with that community in the first place.
itronitron 8y ago
at least some of the toxicity in a community around an open source project is due to the pressure the participants feel in maintaining both their own professional reputation and the viability of the project, and there are positive ways to engage with the core committers that will create goodwill all around. I hope people consider the potential of playing the long game when engaging with a community. Yes there are assholes in the world but they frequently move on to other pursuits, or just die, and after they are gone it's just amazing how excited people are to get things done.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  And what if I value my time enough so as not to want to waste a minute of my life and wait "to play the long game"? ^ I believe that's the premise of the article.
azernik 8y ago
For people criticizing this approach as a selfish one: Fixing toxic communities is work. While it would be a public service for the author to do so, she is under no obligation and probably has a day job and a life that take priority. I praise community-builders and community-shapers and code-sharers and code-reviewers to the heavens, but I'm not going to knock someone who just can't be bothered to do all of that.
- darawk 8y ago
  You don't need to fix a toxic community to just submit your patch. Just submit it, and if they don't want it, they don't want it. But at least you've done the bare minimum of giving back. If they want to tell you to fix your code formatting or something, or make your comments less phallocentric or whatever and you don't like it, don't make the changes - but you still ought to submit the patch.
  - freetime2 8y ago
    On the other hand, reviewing code is also work. One could argue that if you don't intend you follow the contribution guidelines and work with the maintainers to get the code to a state where it's good enough to merge, you are wasting their time.
    - pm215 8y ago
      I agree, but I also think it's easy to avoid that. If you say in your cover letter "I appreciate that this might not be in a good state to merge, but I don't personally have any more time to spend on it and won't be able to respond to any code review; I'm posting it to make it public in case it helps somebody else", then the project knows where it stands with the patch, and can invest time, or not accordingly. (I did something like that with a half-done binutils patch once. It wasn't committed, and I didn't expect it to be. But I was happier having put it out there, so somebody looking for weirdo-TI-COFF-format support maybe had a place to start.)
      - sjm-yc-acct 8y ago
blfr 8y ago
this is how private warez torrent sites work It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state. This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly. Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic." But they're also alive. And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.
- ericdykstra 8y ago
  Lots of private torrent sites are alive and kicking, and lots of open communities die. I'd need more evidence that openness vs closedness is what kills them.
  - blfr 8y ago
    Their forums are ghost towns. What.cd still doesn't have a successor, and one of three strong pretenders didn't even manage to stay online. It may be caused more by competition from Spotifies and Netflixes than their closedness (although I don't agree) but they're certainly not alive and kicking.
    - sincerely 8y ago
      Curious why you don't think redacted.ch is the successor to what.cd? I certainly wouldn't describe it as a "ghost town" or "not alive and kicking". Also wondering what you think of the idea that what.cd may have been too big for a private tracker to exist sustainably?
    - askafriend 8y ago
      $10 a month for more content than I know what to do with is such a cheap price to not have to deal with the pain of torrenting. If it was $20 per DVD like in the past, the pain of torrenting was far less than the pain of the cost of buying your favorite movies. I really think it's that simple. This value equation alone means that a majority of people won't care enough to go the extra length to participate in torrent communities. They'll just pay a small $10 a month to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on any device, anywhere. That'll kill the incentive right from the start.
geekone 8y ago
I see little value in this post. She simply proclaims how "screwed" up HN, Linux, and other communities are, then uses an irrelevant story / anecdote to explain her lack of public participation in open source software. This could have been wrapped up in a tweet along the lines of: "These communities are toxic and screwed up, as I suspected! This reinforces my decision to stay out."
- pdimitar 8y ago
  And what value does your comment have? You basically rephrase her article.
xenadu02 8y ago
IMHO Some of the responses here are missing the point. That seems to be a common theme as of late: "I don't like the argument or I'm already on side 'X' in this fight, so I'm going to setup a straw-man to attack so I can avoid engaging the core premise of the article." Her post isn't about keeping a private repo or being selfish. It's about "I am not your therapist or punching bag, nor is it my job to educate you, so why would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community? What am I supposed to gain from that interaction, other than being insulted, belittled, and having my patches ignored?" She is hardly the only person who stays far away from contributing to the Linux kernel (and other projects) thanks to certain nasty and emotional segments of "community". Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows they exist. The project just has a reputation for being full of assholes, so many really talented people choose to stay away (or strictly limit their involvement). This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical merit. Assholes (by virtue of being assholes) usually immediately dismiss this by claiming anyone making such complaints is technically inferior (or is intrinsically unsuited to contributing because of their age, gender, or other attribute). I'll also point out that acting out like this is purely emotional knee-jerk behavior - the exact opposite of merit or technical arguments. Linus is perfectly capable of criticizing patches on technical merits without calling people morons in the process. In the past he has chosen to lash out emotionally for one reason or another. Perhaps he had a bad day. Perhaps he just enjoyed insulting other people. Perhaps he thought he was better than them and wanted to show off how superior he was. None of us can really know the underlying reason, but at the end of the day it hardly matters. I really want to stress my last point: lots of people (including here on HN) are trying to make a self-evidently Orwellian case that adopting a CoC and setting community standards is somehow trading technical merit for soothing people's feelings... in defense of another contributor's ability to lash out emotionally. One has to engage in some especially motivated reasoning to make such prima-facia false claims. A code-of-conduct basically boils down to "don't attack people personally and don't belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors". Or perhaps in simpler terms: "act like a professional". Being professional means giving direct and honest feedback. Lying to avoid hurt feelings is the opposite of professional!
- jancsika 8y ago
diddid 8y ago
I read this as being similar to “The king is dead long live the king.” Toxicity is just swapped with different toxicity. The road to toxic is often paved with good intentions.
carapace 8y ago
This is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
jancsika 8y ago
> There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-only source repos being shared among friends who are responsible for those they invite, including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out to be troublesome. That could certainly be evidence that FLOSS projects need to do a better job of mentoring newcomers, and of combating abusive and anti-social behavior on their lists and issue trackers. That people are squirreled away on "shadow ecosystems" in sizable numbers would be a sign that FLOSS projects are failing at those tasks. But it is not evidence that the artifacts these shadow ecosystems are producing have much value. If there are indeed a sizable number of participants there would be an example of a fork that releases binaries/tarballs of significantly higher quality than the original project. Does anyone have such an example? * tarball/binary available for fork * fork is significantly improved over the original project * FLOSS dev community for fork is invite only
- blihp 8y ago
  No, there's no reason to do it in private. If you look around there are plenty of people who publicly fork code bases and work together independently of the original project with no drama. It could be they just want to go in a different direction, or to play, or didn't like the original group etc. They own their repo(s), get to decide who's invited in and if they even have a forum/mailing list/whatever. Been that way for decades. That's not to say there aren't very public forks of important projects: they happen all the time. (just a few: Emacs/XEmacs, GCC/EGCS, FFmpeg/Libav, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS) If those who did the fork are right, the new project tends to supersede the original. And when there's a fork because one or more of the controlling personalities is an asshole, it tends to be public, noisy and messy. Note: the Linus/lkml thing barely moves the needle on this scale. (i.e. it's public, but there really hasn't been a lot of noise or mess to date.) Also, Linus is a complete gentleman compared to some of the situations I've read about.
  - compiler-guy 8y ago
    There is a reason to do it in private: So you don't have to deal with the general public and the questions they might ask.
jasonmunro 8y ago
I have been running Open Source projects for about 15 years, which implies moderating the communities around those projects (in my case, very small communities). I'm familiar with toxic environments. I once sent a very stupid question to the qmail mailing list - it did not go well for me. But I learned a lesson from that beat-down. I make serious efforts to create an inclusive environment for my projects because that is what Open Source software is all about IMO. Any contribution deserves respect, it's a gift to the project. Maybe the PR needs some work, maybe it's total crap - but it's a gift either way and that should be respected. It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos just to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic environments - but I understand that is a reality. I would like to counter that with the fact that not all projects are run that way, and some are very willing to accept contributions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pdimitar 8y ago
  > It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos just to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic environments - but I understand that is a reality. So you get sad for me because I am tired, burned out and want to get stuff done without the inevitable drama so many people feel they have to inject in everything? Thank you for being sympathetic. ;) This was half-sarcastic / half-serious. --- On a totally serious note, you cannot at all blame anyone for wanting less -- or zero -- emotional baggage added to what should be a professional exchange of code and conversation points. I seriously cannot and will not care if somebody has a shitty life and spouts poison at me because I try to be helpful and they have nobody else to vent at the moment. I refuse to participate in a free therapy / rage unloading session with them. As we get wiser, we start to get economical with our energy expenditures. Even more conservatively so with emotional expenditures. That one can feel like total crap after even one hour of drama is a harsh reality -- and the fact that many of us choose to avoid ruining our day is absolutely our right. Nothing for you to feel sad about.
deleted 8y ago
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tathougies 8y ago
This is ridiculous. I have projects where I don't want feedback, and I have no intention of fixing bugs. I put them on GitHub and turn off the issue tracker and PR notifications. If others want to fork, fine. If others want to discuss on PRs, fine. I don't care. I'm not fixing it. I avoid the toxicity by not partaking, not hurting my own career.
- hollerith 8y ago
  Rachel (the OP) probably cannot help but have emotional reactions to people's behavior even when the people are strangers and the behavior is entirely online. A large fraction of people are probably like that.
  - irascible 8y ago
    Wat
  - tathougies 8y ago
    I would suggest therapy or religion to those people.
    - hollerith 8y ago
      I hope no one reading my comment (GP) got the impression that I think there is something pathological about Rachel's choice not to publish her code.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  Why though? If it's a smaller project there won't be tons of toxic people (or people at all) that participate. And what if somebody really finds some bug? How is it better to not even know about it, even if you don't plan to fix it?
  - 8y ago
michaelmrose 8y ago
It seems amazing to me that people use toxic to mean "A tiny minority of anonymous people on a world accessable network of people may say mean things" The world is full of at least 10% of people that are just stupid and awful. We should work to keep taking out the trash but we shouldn't turn away from the entire community. If you choose not to share your own work because someone might say mean things I'm disappointed but if you keep private forks of public open source software I feel like your cheating the system that benefits you.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Why do you accept that people being mean to you is a price you must be willing to pay to participate? (Aside, toxic can be much much worse that just "being mean", but I'll engage with your definition here for the sake of discussion.)
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I mean that some portion of the population is between disagreeable and despicable. Good communities ban the despicable but no matter where you draw the line some people will inevitably be negative enough to be a drag without stepping over the line to the point of being banned.
- kelnos 8y ago
  > It seems amazing to me that people use toxic to mean "A tiny minority of anonymous people on a world accessable network of people may say mean things" If that tiny minority are in charge of or prominent in projects you're thinking about contributing to, then that's all that really matters, no?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    How many successful projects are run by people that fit that description?
freetime2 8y ago
Usage of the word "toxic" is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. I see it used all over the place recently to describe groups of people who, while they may exhibit some unfortunate traits, will not actually cause you to get sick or die. More often than not calling people toxic feels more like a way to write off people with whom you disagree or who you simply dislike. This isn't to say that people in e.g. the open source software community don't behave badly. They absolutely do behave badly. But rather than just labeling someone toxic and assuming that everyone agrees and shares your definition of "toxic" - I feel that everyone's interests would be better served by actually describing 1) what exactly the problematic behavior is, 2) why it is bad, and 3) how to behave better. TL;DR I find usage of the word "toxic" to be toxic. :)
- stallmanite 8y ago
  I have the same feeling. "Toxic" is the new "problematic".
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Or maybe you simply disagree with the author of the article and are seeking a way to undermine her opinion and overwrite it with... your opinion? :) That's how your comment came across to me.
  - freetime2 8y ago
    I did not offer any opinion other than I don't like using the word toxic to describe people. But since you bring it up, my opinion on the article is that the author is in no way obligated to contribute code to open source communities that she doesn't like dealing with. In other words, I agree with her. I'll even go a step further and say that I support codes of conduct for online communities if they encourage civil discourse and encourage more people to participate. As for my motivations - my comment was actually more inspired by the comments here than the original article (61 occurrences of the word toxic at the time I write this). Are you now going to suggest that my intent is to undermine everyone who used the word toxic here and replace their opinions with my own? Or are you willing to accept my plea to stop referring to people as toxic at face value?
CannisterFlux 8y ago
I realised as I read this post that I have done exactly this on a few occasions. Taken upstream code, forked it, fixed bugs and used it for myself. Usually there's no conspiracy, I just cannot be bothered dealing with "you're doing it wrong" comments when my fix isn't deemed worthy. The problem I have seen is that certain usually vocal members of a community can have this double-edged helpful-jerk attitude. Most of the time I just lurk on communities, so the jerkiness is rarely if ever even directed at me, but it changes my view of the project to the point where I just don't want to be involved. The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and with a I-know-better-than-you attitude. If the community person dislikes the question asked, or the use that people make of their software, why do they take the time to write answers at all? Usually being pleasant is a question of writing less words as well. These people go out of their way to add snark to the response. This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem. I've seen the exact same thing on guitar forums. Members that post helpful replies, but spread a layer of snark over them. You follow their profile and they often have websites with lots of good free information, lessons and whatnot, but here they are, writing twatish answers. It has been a problem on stackoverflow.com too, and they really stirred things up over there recently trying to herd people into being a bit nicer.
- fefe23 8y ago
  I see this pattern regularly and I always wonder: why would you deny yourself the opportunity to improve? If you have a patch, and others know how to make it better, why would you forgo that chance to learn something? What good can possibly come out of "I'll just hide in my shed" and tell nobody about my patch (that is what the OP recommended, invite-only repositories). You submitting patches has nothing to do with the community. You submitting patches has everything to do with: a) improving the patch to maximize its usefulness b) the project becoming better c) you becoming better d) the project taking over maintenance of your patch so you don't have to. It's a win-win for everybody.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    Your patch might not fit the projects guidelines, but work fine for what you are trying to do. Maybe it even is a hack, which only works in your case. There's also the possibility of time pressure, or just not wanting to deal with possibily snarky comments.
cryptonector 8y ago
I help keep at least one fork due to the upstream community being toxic. It's expensive, but what can you do? A small and healthy community doesn't even need a code of conduct, but in the long run any large community needs by-laws and governance, and that includes rules for punishing toxic participants.
diminoten 8y ago
I just don't understand how you validate and inspect your own ideas without participating in some broader Internet-based community. Be these technical ideas or social ideas, "not participating" is akin to "not examining". The toxicity is just a byproduct, and you try to rise above it, but not participating sounds to me to be a dulling activity, not a sharpening one.
hardwaresofton 8y ago
> I'm here to remind everyone of that post, and to point out that I'm not the only one doing this. There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-only source repos being shared among friends who are responsible for those they invite, including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out to be troublesome. This has crossed my mind before, I think it might be the only way to actually meaningfully stop rapid expansion/dilution of culture, which I think is roughly equivalent to what people mean when they say things get "toxic" or the community worsens (it's a bit of a stretch but you can rephrase toxic behavior as behavior that is not regarded as productive/acceptable by the original or some other culture). Does anyone have any examples like this? An invite-only network that penalizes bad actors by revoking their membership along with everyone else they've invited?
_pmf_ 8y ago
Oh no, the nice guys/gals will put all of their good stuff in super private repos to keep the bullies out!
John_KZ 8y ago
If your ego is so fragile, than good, keep the code to yourself. Some people might be a bit too sharp, but when you get the 100th "bug fix" that includes unsafe code, extra dependencies and the effort put into auditing is 10x the effort to write it on your own, then yes, you'll get a rude response. You might have been meaning well, but others haven't. Your contribution won't be missed.
- zaphar 8y ago
  You are making an unvalidated assumption about her code quality based off of her desire to not participate. This sort unsubstantiated opinion, stated with an implied assumption of fact, is exactly the sort off thing that contributes to toxicity in a community.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > than good *then
sureaboutthis 8y ago
> ...the Central Intelligence Agency has used it for hacking, Google for crawling webpages, Pixar for producing movies and Spotify for recommending songs. This statement gives articles and journalism like this a bad name. It's as misleading as you can get as it gives the impression Python would be the main language for these jobs and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm sure it participates in some way, directly or indirectly, but doesn't perform the main function. And then we get this: > Fortran, Lisp and Ada were all highly popular in the 1980s and 1990s Which may be true for Fortran and maybe even Ada in defense or government but Lisp? I don't think so.
nailer 8y ago
> What's funny is that my friends in the know tell me this is how private warez torrent sites work: you invite someone, and now you're responsible for their behavior. If they mess up, you deal with them, or you might be out, too. lobste.rs works like this too. Tree structures of invites are a great way to prune further up the tree when undesired behavior happens.
- Harkins 8y ago
  I believe only once has someone who invited a problem user been banned. That inviter contributed a feature to disable invitations and was unbanned. But I think the possibility also has a deterring effect that prompts people to exercise care. (Context: I'm the lobsters admin.)
RustyRussell 8y ago
This is why I always try to accept people's first contributions, even if it means reworking them to fit (I usually just do it if it's trivial, or give guidance and offer to do it if not). I have generally had really great responses when I've sent drive-by tweaks to other FOSS projects, so I feel obliged to pay that forward to others.
petercooper 8y ago
The private/secret repos I'm talking about? They're probably operating under Fight Club rules. If you aren't plugged in, they don't even exist as far as you are concerned. You don't even know you're missing out. I don't think this is staying out of the community. It's staying out of a community by forming another community, complete with its own set of good/bad people, rules, and expectations. Indeed, this is how many popular communities began - small, insular, quiet, before growing larger as human constructions frequently do.
- slivym 8y ago
  Absolutely, and additionally to this, it's not forming a well-behaved community, it's forming a community that behaves in the way this particular person likes. It's just as likely to be full of snark and bitching.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    This is likely, you say... according to whom? The author clearly expressed their lack of desire to deal with drama or toxicity. What makes you think they will tolerate it in another community?
mcherm 8y ago
Well that sucks. I mean she is WELCOME to keep her contributions to private repos shared only among trusted friends if that's how she wants to work. But it's not for me. I want the work that I do to be shared as widely as possible. (I would share more widely if my employer permitted it.) That is why I choose permissive licenses, and make an effort to contribute patches back to the original source. Yes, sometimes the communities are toxic. When I see that I speak up. Yes, sometimes my code contributions are used by people I don't much like or used for purposes I don't support. But far MORE often they are used by people I don't know, who I would certainly find to be perfectly nice folks if I ever DID meet them, but individual connections don't scale. So Rachel is welcome to her insular community -- but I'm going to stick to the open one. I'd rather fix the flaws it has than hope to get a better one by foregoing the openness.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  How long did it take Linus to realize his behavior was toxic? How many times was he told? That's a lot of work to fix a project for almost no benefit to yourself. Life is too short to deal with [people who aren't nice].
mcguire 8y ago
The linked article from 2013 is worth a read, too: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/
draw_down 8y ago
I definitely don’t get invited to any secret repos, but otherwise I’m 100% with her on this. I stay away from open source projects and tech conferences. People just seem so willing to operate in bad faith and willingly misunderstand one another, in a variety of ways and from a variety of viewpoints.

242 points by pulisse 8y ago

It comes across as elitist to keep code fixes in your own private repository to 'punish' those you don't agree with. The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree with?

wrkronmiller 8y ago
I doubt the motive is to punish, but is instead to avoid the unwanted drama of dealing with a "toxic" community.
Aeolun 8y ago
I think the point is, whenever I fork a piece of code, fix something, and push the fix back upstream, there’s a whole set of things I apparently didn’t do to the maintainers liking. I don’t want to deal with that...
- Scaevolus 8y ago
  My favorite is when they demand you write tests for a three-line change to code that has no tests.
  - Thiez 8y ago
    In their defence, deciding you're going to require new tests for all new additions in a pretty effective way to get out of the 'there are no tests' situation. I recently heard something along the lines of "don't bother adding new tests, this project barely has any tests anyway" about a project where I have been trying to increase test coverage whenever I have to make a change in recent months. With that attitude it's no surprise the project barely had any tests... Naturally it is not a reasonable request when there is no existing testing infrastructure yet.
geofft 8y ago
> The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. Whose point is this? It is not the point of the free software movement as seen by the FSF, which calls the APSL 1.x non-free because it requires you to publish changes https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-apsl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-apsl.html , nor of the (largely similar) free software movement as seen by Debian, which has a "dissident test" that explicitly requires you have the option of keeping changes among your trusted friends (assuming you trust them not to republish, of course) https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html . It is certainly not the point of the open-source movement nor the Linux Foundation, both of which are firmly supportive of companies making internal improvements and not publishing any of them. If it is your point, I urge you to reconsider a position that focuses on individuals not publishing code instead of corporations not publishing code.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sandov 8y ago
Except that sometimes "those you don't agree with" don't really care about the repo, they just want to push their political agenda. Other times your conscience might feel cleaner just knowing that you aren't part of a group that does things you don't like, for example: discrimination based on race. Some big projects have partnered with programs like Outreachy, that decide who to help based on the ethnicity, gender, and sexuality of the applicant. Would you feel comfortable working for a project that openly partners with the KKK to foster adoption of open source in the white supremacist community?. This is an extreme example, but I'm using it for the sake of the argument: Most of us wouldn't want to work for such a project, even though some people might be more malleable than others.
munchbunny 8y ago
The motive isn't to "punish." It's much more basic than that: I just don't want to deal with the toxicity of the community, and the best way to accomplish that is to not engage. Once I engage, I will probably need to spend mental cycles dealing with it. > The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers. I think this is both an admirable view but also a naive one. Code is built, maintained, modified, sold, bought, and used by humans, so at the end of the day code is a human endeavor, and that means you will never escape having to deal with other humans in the process of writing code. You might have more or less pleasant interactions, but (at least before the singularity) code doesn't exist outside the context of human interactions. I've personally constantly sought ways to spend more time coding and less time dealing with people, but my efforts have only reinforced the bittersweet message that the code I write is both more effective and more useful when I engage with people more. So at some point I just embraced the human element of the craft. But that comes with managing my emotional and social energy, which also means avoiding communities I don't need to be a part of.
itronitron 8y ago
>> What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree with? What a wonderful world that would be.
paulie_a 8y ago
It's not elitist, it's just not wanting to deal with assholes. I think that is pretty understandable. That doesn't punish them it just results in not dealing with them.
- preordained 8y ago
  This is my take. I think this goes on at all levels. I know I definitely take some roundabout paths at work from time to time to avoid people with big egos because it's just a roadblock and a time suck. Ideally, we could work together and be more efficient, but some people just don't want to play nice or fair and there are only so many hours in the day.
BeetleB 8y ago
>It comes across as elitist to keep code fixes in your own private repository to 'punish' those you don't agree with. Throughout my life I seem to have endless arguments about this. Many people seem to have a binary view of the world (positive/negative), and many others (like me) tend to have more of a ternary view (positive/neutral/negative). No one is punishing anyone. Not helping is neutral. It is not a punishment. If I dislike what you do and decide to withdraw support I had been providing, I am not punishing you. I am merely disengaging with you. My position is the same as that of someone who never helped you and continues not to help you. And of course, as another person has pointed out. When someone gives you something with the explicit permission that you do not have to give back, it is petty to complain when they don't give back.
dbt00 8y ago
If freedom to share code doesn't include freedom to not share code, it's not very free, is it? The meta-point is that everybody's wringing their hands over "oh no, I can't say things I want to say and also contribute to Linux", and her point is that this is not new, lots of people have experienced this for a long time.

Myrmornis 8y ago

Really silly, mean-spirited post. Open-source software is one of the pinnacles of human culture, and it's a wonderful fact that our most capitalist economies depend on it absolutely. There is nothing impressive or honourable or wise or interesting about the sentiment expressed in the post.

spiderfarmer 8y ago
..and evidently, the open source community and its products could be even more impressive if it was better at responding to criticism. You are bad at this - and that’s a problem.
- Myrmornis 8y ago
  I'm just stating my opinion; that's essentially what this site is for. I wasn't criticized and therefore was not responding to criticism. It is true that I have little time for codes of conduct etc.
  - spiderfarmer 8y ago
    "It is true that I have little time for codes of conduct etc" That's the worst excuse for plastering the internet with low quality 'opinions' like the one above.
    - Myrmornis 8y ago
      No, the problem is that you don’t like my opinion, not that it is low quality. And that’s absolutely fine. I made two serious points in 3 sentences; the remainder was a criticism of the post. My points were about what a fascinating and positive phenomenon open source is. If you’d like I can explain them to you again.
commandlinefan 8y ago
She seems to be implying that she has one hell of a fix for the Linux kernel, but she’s not sharing it because Linus is mean to contributors. I can’t fathom how awesome this fix must be for her to write about it twice, and she doesn’t go into any detail.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Everything you've already heard about on HN and/or your favorite this-leaning or that-leaning web site. This is a legitimate question, and I have an answer, but I don't think many people are going to like it. My response to this is to say "wow, look at how screwed up these communities are", and then tag on "just like I always suspected", and then finally I add "and that reinforces my decision to stay out of them". Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here.

escherplex 8y ago
Intelligent self-critical and/or masochistic penchants of the community, I'd guess :)
nickpsecurity 8y ago
"Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here." Yeah, that was funny to think about. I've only seen so many articles. Her write-ups were mostly technical dodging politics a lot. The back and forth, downvote mobs, or whatever kick in with politics on certain topics or views due to community's biases. If she stays away from that, then she can still be really popular. Whereas, she just now admitted something that could be in the red zone for some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS. It's simultaneously a response that's understandable or folks might sympathize with for the portion that is concerned about toxic behavior in general FOSS and/or toward minority members in particular. Still a grey area in potential reaction here. I find it fascinating to watch how these things play out. Regardless, her posts about spotting problems, solving them, and keeping them from recurring were pretty awesome. Most of us will probably still respect her regardless of how much she's embracing or dodging online communities.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I don't care one iota if she does or does not participate on HN or in any other community. The only other post of hers I recall reading boiled down to her refusing to fix a thing at work that it was her responsibility to fix and wouldn't have taken very long, like a few minutes, and leaving it that way for six months, calling it "an experiment" to see if anyone else would fix it and then talking trash about everyone else at work when her boss finally told her to fix it already. It struck me as very unprofessional, childish and toxic. She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming. I'm not a programmer, so that might just be my ignorance showing. But my guess is that's the primary reason her writing shows up here so often, because it doesn't strike me as great writing overall and her attitude seems to be pretty toxic generally while she blames that on everyone else. She could make a lot of the same points she makes without pissing all over everyone in the process. She could very reasonably say "I'm a woman in tech, so I deal with brogrammers 40+ hours a week and I have no patience left to do more of that in my off hours." She could say "Eh, different strokes for different folks. I share my stuff with people I enjoy talking with and I'm okay with that meaning it isn't out there in the ether for the whole world to access. We can't all be Linux." She could make all the same choices she is currently making and describe them in her blog without gratuitously pissing all over a community that very likely accounts for a large share, perhaps even the vast majority, of her blog traffic.

peterwwillis 8y ago

I've been involved with open source communities off and on for over a decade, as well as other, non-computer communities. News flash: It's not the community that becomes toxic, it's humanity. Every community that I've ever witnessed gets toxic at some point. As in-groups grow more insular and people become more involved, they get more toxic. But the solution to this phenomenon doesn't have to be black & white. I have always stayed on the margins of communities, and still dip my toes in the water occasionally to get something done. But do I need to keep private forks of patches to avoid messy interactions? Nope. It's pretty easy to fire off a pull request or patch set and then forget about it. I'm not investing great deals of effort or emotion. I'm just sharing my crap. If they merge it, fine, if they don't, fine. But I'm certainly not keeping super secret private repos for just the cool kids to use. That would be even more involved than what little I am already.

nickpsecurity 8y ago
I like your route. Another thing to point out about just fire-and-don't-care-if-it-hits contributions is you still can take credit for them. You put your effort in, you improved the software as you see it, you benefit from that even if they don't want it, others can benefit from your fork, and (if branding) you can even highlight your improvement in CV or resume. So, you and/or others might benefit from them taking your contributions. You and/or others might still benefit when they don't. You can't control what they do anyway. So, might as well set it up so you and others can benefit either way.
- tzs 8y ago
  Fire and forget open source can be fun if you truly forget about it, because then you can be surprised by coming across it in the wild. I wrote something in the early '90s, entirely for my own use. I thought others might find it useful, so tossed it up on my public FTP space at school, added a notice saying it was public domain, posted a single message to the appropriate Usenet group saying it was available in case anyone might find it useful, but that since it fully satisfied my needs I was not going to do any further work on it nor was I interested in any enhancements, and stopped reading that Usenet group. I few years later I noticed Red Hat included a package with the same name ("suck"). Curious, I looked to see what it did--and found it was a descendant of mine! Someone looking for something like it found mine, which did a good chunk of what they were looking for, added the parts missing for their needs, and had been maintaining and distributing it. (And I just checked...it's still in some Linux distros! It's in Debian 9, package name "suck". Too bad I've long since lost my original code. It would be interesting to see if anything of mine has survived in it).

seneca 8y ago

While I don't think her solution is the best, I can't say I disagree with the spirit of this post. With politics being dragged ever more into the software world, people attacking everyone for any perceived transgression, attempts to get people kicked out of communities, or even fired, over social media comments, you really need to consider what you're exposing yourself to by getting involved in the open source community. You would think that a community based on giving away typically very expensive effort would be more welcoming, but somehow we've ended up with this. It does seem like this is just part of some wider trend though. It's not just the software world, public communities in general seem to be destabilizing and radicalizing.

cannonedhamster 8y ago
It's not perception. It's a byproduct of a few different things. Close interaction between people of different social classes, lack of faith in governmental institutions, massive changes in labor markets, and in the U.S. in particular massive disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and archaic voting and representation laws.

village-idiot 8y ago

When shit started hitting the fan with the Linux CoC, my boss indicated that it was a shame that the CoC was being used as a tool for political revenge. My response was to wonder why there were so many grudges? The CoC is for certain acting like gasoline on a fire, but I don’t believe it was the spark. Glad I never really bothered to try interacting with that community in the first place.

itronitron 8y ago

at least some of the toxicity in a community around an open source project is due to the pressure the participants feel in maintaining both their own professional reputation and the viability of the project, and there are positive ways to engage with the core committers that will create goodwill all around. I hope people consider the potential of playing the long game when engaging with a community. Yes there are assholes in the world but they frequently move on to other pursuits, or just die, and after they are gone it's just amazing how excited people are to get things done.

pdimitar 8y ago
And what if I value my time enough so as not to want to waste a minute of my life and wait "to play the long game"? ^ I believe that's the premise of the article.

azernik 8y ago

For people criticizing this approach as a selfish one: Fixing toxic communities is work. While it would be a public service for the author to do so, she is under no obligation and probably has a day job and a life that take priority. I praise community-builders and community-shapers and code-sharers and code-reviewers to the heavens, but I'm not going to knock someone who just can't be bothered to do all of that.

darawk 8y ago
You don't need to fix a toxic community to just submit your patch. Just submit it, and if they don't want it, they don't want it. But at least you've done the bare minimum of giving back. If they want to tell you to fix your code formatting or something, or make your comments less phallocentric or whatever and you don't like it, don't make the changes - but you still ought to submit the patch.
- freetime2 8y ago
  On the other hand, reviewing code is also work. One could argue that if you don't intend you follow the contribution guidelines and work with the maintainers to get the code to a state where it's good enough to merge, you are wasting their time.
  - pm215 8y ago
    I agree, but I also think it's easy to avoid that. If you say in your cover letter "I appreciate that this might not be in a good state to merge, but I don't personally have any more time to spend on it and won't be able to respond to any code review; I'm posting it to make it public in case it helps somebody else", then the project knows where it stands with the patch, and can invest time, or not accordingly. (I did something like that with a half-done binutils patch once. It wasn't committed, and I didn't expect it to be. But I was happier having put it out there, so somebody looking for weirdo-TI-COFF-format support maybe had a place to start.)
    - sjm-yc-acct 8y ago

blfr 8y ago

this is how private warez torrent sites work It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state. This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly. Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic." But they're also alive. And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.

ericdykstra 8y ago
Lots of private torrent sites are alive and kicking, and lots of open communities die. I'd need more evidence that openness vs closedness is what kills them.
- blfr 8y ago
  Their forums are ghost towns. What.cd still doesn't have a successor, and one of three strong pretenders didn't even manage to stay online. It may be caused more by competition from Spotifies and Netflixes than their closedness (although I don't agree) but they're certainly not alive and kicking.
  - sincerely 8y ago
    Curious why you don't think redacted.ch is the successor to what.cd? I certainly wouldn't describe it as a "ghost town" or "not alive and kicking". Also wondering what you think of the idea that what.cd may have been too big for a private tracker to exist sustainably?
  - askafriend 8y ago
    $10 a month for more content than I know what to do with is such a cheap price to not have to deal with the pain of torrenting. If it was $20 per DVD like in the past, the pain of torrenting was far less than the pain of the cost of buying your favorite movies. I really think it's that simple. This value equation alone means that a majority of people won't care enough to go the extra length to participate in torrent communities. They'll just pay a small $10 a month to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on any device, anywhere. That'll kill the incentive right from the start.

geekone 8y ago

I see little value in this post. She simply proclaims how "screwed" up HN, Linux, and other communities are, then uses an irrelevant story / anecdote to explain her lack of public participation in open source software. This could have been wrapped up in a tweet along the lines of: "These communities are toxic and screwed up, as I suspected! This reinforces my decision to stay out."

pdimitar 8y ago
And what value does your comment have? You basically rephrase her article.

xenadu02 8y ago

IMHO Some of the responses here are missing the point. That seems to be a common theme as of late: "I don't like the argument or I'm already on side 'X' in this fight, so I'm going to setup a straw-man to attack so I can avoid engaging the core premise of the article." Her post isn't about keeping a private repo or being selfish. It's about "I am not your therapist or punching bag, nor is it my job to educate you, so why would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community? What am I supposed to gain from that interaction, other than being insulted, belittled, and having my patches ignored?" She is hardly the only person who stays far away from contributing to the Linux kernel (and other projects) thanks to certain nasty and emotional segments of "community". Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows they exist. The project just has a reputation for being full of assholes, so many really talented people choose to stay away (or strictly limit their involvement). This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical merit. Assholes (by virtue of being assholes) usually immediately dismiss this by claiming anyone making such complaints is technically inferior (or is intrinsically unsuited to contributing because of their age, gender, or other attribute). I'll also point out that acting out like this is purely emotional knee-jerk behavior - the exact opposite of merit or technical arguments. Linus is perfectly capable of criticizing patches on technical merits without calling people morons in the process. In the past he has chosen to lash out emotionally for one reason or another. Perhaps he had a bad day. Perhaps he just enjoyed insulting other people. Perhaps he thought he was better than them and wanted to show off how superior he was. None of us can really know the underlying reason, but at the end of the day it hardly matters. I really want to stress my last point: lots of people (including here on HN) are trying to make a self-evidently Orwellian case that adopting a CoC and setting community standards is somehow trading technical merit for soothing people's feelings... in defense of another contributor's ability to lash out emotionally. One has to engage in some especially motivated reasoning to make such prima-facia false claims. A code-of-conduct basically boils down to "don't attack people personally and don't belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors". Or perhaps in simpler terms: "act like a professional". Being professional means giving direct and honest feedback. Lying to avoid hurt feelings is the opposite of professional!

jancsika 8y ago

diddid 8y ago

I read this as being similar to “The king is dead long live the king.” Toxicity is just swapped with different toxicity. The road to toxic is often paved with good intentions.

carapace 8y ago

This is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

jancsika 8y ago

> There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-only source repos being shared among friends who are responsible for those they invite, including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out to be troublesome. That could certainly be evidence that FLOSS projects need to do a better job of mentoring newcomers, and of combating abusive and anti-social behavior on their lists and issue trackers. That people are squirreled away on "shadow ecosystems" in sizable numbers would be a sign that FLOSS projects are failing at those tasks. But it is not evidence that the artifacts these shadow ecosystems are producing have much value. If there are indeed a sizable number of participants there would be an example of a fork that releases binaries/tarballs of significantly higher quality than the original project. Does anyone have such an example? * tarball/binary available for fork * fork is significantly improved over the original project * FLOSS dev community for fork is invite only

blihp 8y ago
No, there's no reason to do it in private. If you look around there are plenty of people who publicly fork code bases and work together independently of the original project with no drama. It could be they just want to go in a different direction, or to play, or didn't like the original group etc. They own their repo(s), get to decide who's invited in and if they even have a forum/mailing list/whatever. Been that way for decades. That's not to say there aren't very public forks of important projects: they happen all the time. (just a few: Emacs/XEmacs, GCC/EGCS, FFmpeg/Libav, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS) If those who did the fork are right, the new project tends to supersede the original. And when there's a fork because one or more of the controlling personalities is an asshole, it tends to be public, noisy and messy. Note: the Linus/lkml thing barely moves the needle on this scale. (i.e. it's public, but there really hasn't been a lot of noise or mess to date.) Also, Linus is a complete gentleman compared to some of the situations I've read about.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  There is a reason to do it in private: So you don't have to deal with the general public and the questions they might ask.

jasonmunro 8y ago

I have been running Open Source projects for about 15 years, which implies moderating the communities around those projects (in my case, very small communities). I'm familiar with toxic environments. I once sent a very stupid question to the qmail mailing list - it did not go well for me. But I learned a lesson from that beat-down. I make serious efforts to create an inclusive environment for my projects because that is what Open Source software is all about IMO. Any contribution deserves respect, it's a gift to the project. Maybe the PR needs some work, maybe it's total crap - but it's a gift either way and that should be respected. It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos just to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic environments - but I understand that is a reality. I would like to counter that with the fact that not all projects are run that way, and some are very willing to accept contributions.

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pdimitar 8y ago
> It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos just to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic environments - but I understand that is a reality. So you get sad for me because I am tired, burned out and want to get stuff done without the inevitable drama so many people feel they have to inject in everything? Thank you for being sympathetic. ;) This was half-sarcastic / half-serious. --- On a totally serious note, you cannot at all blame anyone for wanting less -- or zero -- emotional baggage added to what should be a professional exchange of code and conversation points. I seriously cannot and will not care if somebody has a shitty life and spouts poison at me because I try to be helpful and they have nobody else to vent at the moment. I refuse to participate in a free therapy / rage unloading session with them. As we get wiser, we start to get economical with our energy expenditures. Even more conservatively so with emotional expenditures. That one can feel like total crap after even one hour of drama is a harsh reality -- and the fact that many of us choose to avoid ruining our day is absolutely our right. Nothing for you to feel sad about.

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tathougies 8y ago

This is ridiculous. I have projects where I don't want feedback, and I have no intention of fixing bugs. I put them on GitHub and turn off the issue tracker and PR notifications. If others want to fork, fine. If others want to discuss on PRs, fine. I don't care. I'm not fixing it. I avoid the toxicity by not partaking, not hurting my own career.

hollerith 8y ago
Rachel (the OP) probably cannot help but have emotional reactions to people's behavior even when the people are strangers and the behavior is entirely online. A large fraction of people are probably like that.
- irascible 8y ago
  Wat
- tathougies 8y ago
  I would suggest therapy or religion to those people.
  - hollerith 8y ago
    I hope no one reading my comment (GP) got the impression that I think there is something pathological about Rachel's choice not to publish her code.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Double_a_92 8y ago
Why though? If it's a smaller project there won't be tons of toxic people (or people at all) that participate. And what if somebody really finds some bug? How is it better to not even know about it, even if you don't plan to fix it?
- 8y ago

michaelmrose 8y ago

It seems amazing to me that people use toxic to mean "A tiny minority of anonymous people on a world accessable network of people may say mean things" The world is full of at least 10% of people that are just stupid and awful. We should work to keep taking out the trash but we shouldn't turn away from the entire community. If you choose not to share your own work because someone might say mean things I'm disappointed but if you keep private forks of public open source software I feel like your cheating the system that benefits you.

Pfhreak 8y ago
Why do you accept that people being mean to you is a price you must be willing to pay to participate? (Aside, toxic can be much much worse that just "being mean", but I'll engage with your definition here for the sake of discussion.)
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  I mean that some portion of the population is between disagreeable and despicable. Good communities ban the despicable but no matter where you draw the line some people will inevitably be negative enough to be a drag without stepping over the line to the point of being banned.
kelnos 8y ago
> It seems amazing to me that people use toxic to mean "A tiny minority of anonymous people on a world accessable network of people may say mean things" If that tiny minority are in charge of or prominent in projects you're thinking about contributing to, then that's all that really matters, no?
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  How many successful projects are run by people that fit that description?

freetime2 8y ago

Usage of the word "toxic" is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. I see it used all over the place recently to describe groups of people who, while they may exhibit some unfortunate traits, will not actually cause you to get sick or die. More often than not calling people toxic feels more like a way to write off people with whom you disagree or who you simply dislike. This isn't to say that people in e.g. the open source software community don't behave badly. They absolutely do behave badly. But rather than just labeling someone toxic and assuming that everyone agrees and shares your definition of "toxic" - I feel that everyone's interests would be better served by actually describing 1) what exactly the problematic behavior is, 2) why it is bad, and 3) how to behave better. TL;DR I find usage of the word "toxic" to be toxic. :)

stallmanite 8y ago
I have the same feeling. "Toxic" is the new "problematic".
pdimitar 8y ago
Or maybe you simply disagree with the author of the article and are seeking a way to undermine her opinion and overwrite it with... your opinion? :) That's how your comment came across to me.
- freetime2 8y ago
  I did not offer any opinion other than I don't like using the word toxic to describe people. But since you bring it up, my opinion on the article is that the author is in no way obligated to contribute code to open source communities that she doesn't like dealing with. In other words, I agree with her. I'll even go a step further and say that I support codes of conduct for online communities if they encourage civil discourse and encourage more people to participate. As for my motivations - my comment was actually more inspired by the comments here than the original article (61 occurrences of the word toxic at the time I write this). Are you now going to suggest that my intent is to undermine everyone who used the word toxic here and replace their opinions with my own? Or are you willing to accept my plea to stop referring to people as toxic at face value?

CannisterFlux 8y ago

I realised as I read this post that I have done exactly this on a few occasions. Taken upstream code, forked it, fixed bugs and used it for myself. Usually there's no conspiracy, I just cannot be bothered dealing with "you're doing it wrong" comments when my fix isn't deemed worthy. The problem I have seen is that certain usually vocal members of a community can have this double-edged helpful-jerk attitude. Most of the time I just lurk on communities, so the jerkiness is rarely if ever even directed at me, but it changes my view of the project to the point where I just don't want to be involved. The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and with a I-know-better-than-you attitude. If the community person dislikes the question asked, or the use that people make of their software, why do they take the time to write answers at all? Usually being pleasant is a question of writing less words as well. These people go out of their way to add snark to the response. This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem. I've seen the exact same thing on guitar forums. Members that post helpful replies, but spread a layer of snark over them. You follow their profile and they often have websites with lots of good free information, lessons and whatnot, but here they are, writing twatish answers. It has been a problem on stackoverflow.com too, and they really stirred things up over there recently trying to herd people into being a bit nicer.

fefe23 8y ago
I see this pattern regularly and I always wonder: why would you deny yourself the opportunity to improve? If you have a patch, and others know how to make it better, why would you forgo that chance to learn something? What good can possibly come out of "I'll just hide in my shed" and tell nobody about my patch (that is what the OP recommended, invite-only repositories). You submitting patches has nothing to do with the community. You submitting patches has everything to do with: a) improving the patch to maximize its usefulness b) the project becoming better c) you becoming better d) the project taking over maintenance of your patch so you don't have to. It's a win-win for everybody.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  Your patch might not fit the projects guidelines, but work fine for what you are trying to do. Maybe it even is a hack, which only works in your case. There's also the possibility of time pressure, or just not wanting to deal with possibily snarky comments.

cryptonector 8y ago

I help keep at least one fork due to the upstream community being toxic. It's expensive, but what can you do? A small and healthy community doesn't even need a code of conduct, but in the long run any large community needs by-laws and governance, and that includes rules for punishing toxic participants.

diminoten 8y ago

I just don't understand how you validate and inspect your own ideas without participating in some broader Internet-based community. Be these technical ideas or social ideas, "not participating" is akin to "not examining". The toxicity is just a byproduct, and you try to rise above it, but not participating sounds to me to be a dulling activity, not a sharpening one.

hardwaresofton 8y ago

> I'm here to remind everyone of that post, and to point out that I'm not the only one doing this. There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-only source repos being shared among friends who are responsible for those they invite, including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out to be troublesome. This has crossed my mind before, I think it might be the only way to actually meaningfully stop rapid expansion/dilution of culture, which I think is roughly equivalent to what people mean when they say things get "toxic" or the community worsens (it's a bit of a stretch but you can rephrase toxic behavior as behavior that is not regarded as productive/acceptable by the original or some other culture). Does anyone have any examples like this? An invite-only network that penalizes bad actors by revoking their membership along with everyone else they've invited?

_pmf_ 8y ago

Oh no, the nice guys/gals will put all of their good stuff in super private repos to keep the bullies out!

John_KZ 8y ago

If your ego is so fragile, than good, keep the code to yourself. Some people might be a bit too sharp, but when you get the 100th "bug fix" that includes unsafe code, extra dependencies and the effort put into auditing is 10x the effort to write it on your own, then yes, you'll get a rude response. You might have been meaning well, but others haven't. Your contribution won't be missed.

zaphar 8y ago
You are making an unvalidated assumption about her code quality based off of her desire to not participate. This sort unsubstantiated opinion, stated with an implied assumption of fact, is exactly the sort off thing that contributes to toxicity in a community.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> than good *then

sureaboutthis 8y ago

> ...the Central Intelligence Agency has used it for hacking, Google for crawling webpages, Pixar for producing movies and Spotify for recommending songs. This statement gives articles and journalism like this a bad name. It's as misleading as you can get as it gives the impression Python would be the main language for these jobs and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm sure it participates in some way, directly or indirectly, but doesn't perform the main function. And then we get this: > Fortran, Lisp and Ada were all highly popular in the 1980s and 1990s Which may be true for Fortran and maybe even Ada in defense or government but Lisp? I don't think so.

nailer 8y ago

> What's funny is that my friends in the know tell me this is how private warez torrent sites work: you invite someone, and now you're responsible for their behavior. If they mess up, you deal with them, or you might be out, too. lobste.rs works like this too. Tree structures of invites are a great way to prune further up the tree when undesired behavior happens.

Harkins 8y ago
I believe only once has someone who invited a problem user been banned. That inviter contributed a feature to disable invitations and was unbanned. But I think the possibility also has a deterring effect that prompts people to exercise care. (Context: I'm the lobsters admin.)

RustyRussell 8y ago

This is why I always try to accept people's first contributions, even if it means reworking them to fit (I usually just do it if it's trivial, or give guidance and offer to do it if not). I have generally had really great responses when I've sent drive-by tweaks to other FOSS projects, so I feel obliged to pay that forward to others.

petercooper 8y ago

The private/secret repos I'm talking about? They're probably operating under Fight Club rules. If you aren't plugged in, they don't even exist as far as you are concerned. You don't even know you're missing out. I don't think this is staying out of the community. It's staying out of a community by forming another community, complete with its own set of good/bad people, rules, and expectations. Indeed, this is how many popular communities began - small, insular, quiet, before growing larger as human constructions frequently do.

slivym 8y ago
Absolutely, and additionally to this, it's not forming a well-behaved community, it's forming a community that behaves in the way this particular person likes. It's just as likely to be full of snark and bitching.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  This is likely, you say... according to whom? The author clearly expressed their lack of desire to deal with drama or toxicity. What makes you think they will tolerate it in another community?

mcherm 8y ago

Well that sucks. I mean she is WELCOME to keep her contributions to private repos shared only among trusted friends if that's how she wants to work. But it's not for me. I want the work that I do to be shared as widely as possible. (I would share more widely if my employer permitted it.) That is why I choose permissive licenses, and make an effort to contribute patches back to the original source. Yes, sometimes the communities are toxic. When I see that I speak up. Yes, sometimes my code contributions are used by people I don't much like or used for purposes I don't support. But far MORE often they are used by people I don't know, who I would certainly find to be perfectly nice folks if I ever DID meet them, but individual connections don't scale. So Rachel is welcome to her insular community -- but I'm going to stick to the open one. I'd rather fix the flaws it has than hope to get a better one by foregoing the openness.

compiler-guy 8y ago
How long did it take Linus to realize his behavior was toxic? How many times was he told? That's a lot of work to fix a project for almost no benefit to yourself. Life is too short to deal with [people who aren't nice].

mcguire 8y ago

The linked article from 2013 is worth a read, too: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/

draw_down 8y ago

I definitely don’t get invited to any secret repos, but otherwise I’m 100% with her on this. I stay away from open source projects and tech conferences. People just seem so willing to operate in bad faith and willingly misunderstand one another, in a variety of ways and from a variety of viewpoints.