8 ms·

A recent experience from a hackerspace showed me how incredibly thankless people can be. After working really insanely hard to build an inclusive space with loa

by l0b0 8y ago

A recent experience from a hackerspace showed me how incredibly thankless people can be. After working really insanely hard to build an inclusive space with loads of features, every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. Even if I had the time, money and expertise I would never do something like that. These days you can't even ban assholes without everyone making like you're the one with a problem. And even a single person with a grudge can make you more problems than anyone can reasonably deal with while having a life.

shriphani 8y ago
gallery house in palo alto has an interesting model - membership comes with a volunteering requirement - it can't obviously reach the level of NY MOMA but it works well for Palo Alto and is a nice little gallery that has launched quite a few careers.
- Hendrikto 8y ago
  > volunteering requirement Isn’t that an oxymoron?
  - maehwasu 8y ago
    Read as: "free work requirement"
    - jrochkind1 8y ago
      Not "free work" either. As payment for your membership, a work trade in return for the benefits of membership. Consumer cooperatives (which are actually legally _owned_ by their members, via member shares in the coop corporation) have been doing this forever. Like the famous (both loved and hated) Park Slope Food Coop [grocery store]. The Park Slope Coop simply calls it a "work requirement", and it is "2 hours and 45 minutes once every four weeks." The Park Slop coop is famous for crazy internal politics, so a work requirement is definitely no magic bullet against such. The Park Slope Coop is also loved by many though.
  - imglorp 8y ago
    Another way to think about it is sweat equity. Habitat for Humanity is a great model here. In the HUD model, you hand out housing to poor people. Sometimes they take care of it and prosper, but usually not. Places get trashed, fixtures and copper ripped from the walls, and that's the end. You get "the projects." In the HFH model, recipients must have jobs, references, and commitment. They get ongoing support from HFH and the community, who come to help build their house. The recipients actually buy the houses with low-rate mortgages, plus they need to put in some sweat equity with HFH either working on their house or someone else's, or on a committee like fund raising. The result is a homeowner who takes pride in their house, who has the connections and support of their neighbors, and who is more likely to elevate the community, including neighbors who didn't qualify for HFH. There are some lessons here for a community space.
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      Wow, so Jimmy Carter really is one of the richest people in the world, if you count Habitat for Humanity sweat equity.
  - shriphani 8y ago
    more like skin in the game maybe?
arkades 8y ago
As a big fan of hackerspaces, I’d love to hear more about your experiences.
tomcam 8y ago
Please write about your experience! Also, sorry you had to go through that.
- antt 8y ago
  Writing about it would drive you insane, here it is in image, gif and email form: https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com shitnoisebridgesays.tumblr.com A high point for me was getting my site ddos'd and ssh brute force attacked when I decided to run a course in another hacker space after being stuck for committee approval for 3 months. The saddest part is that I knew it would happen and scraped the site into a static html site served from nginx from a box that would could only be administered through a two hop tunnel. Then the guy who I know did it went around stalking me on social media telling everyone I ... I'll actually take my advice and just leave it there.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    OT: Regarding Tumblr, what cookies do you need to allow nowadays to be able to read it? I haven’t been able to see Tumblr links for months, at least. All it does is redirect to the front page and prompt me to sign in.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      You can click "allow" to let you track them in obscure and unknowable ways. I gave up and let my adblock get them, but I should just have closed the tab.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Wow, that sux. When you wrote about assholes up there, I imagined something waaay milder. Makes me appreciate people who organize these things a bit more.
  - jurassic 8y ago
    Early in my career, I nearly quit tech because of a negative experience I had with some douchebros at a noisebridge javascript event. In retrospect those guys were just a couple insecure idiots and really not representative of the average tech man, but as a woman trying to break into the industry I thought that’s what I was going to have to deal with every day in every job. Nonetheless I persisted.
usgroup 8y ago
Yeah ... people . But the good news is that once you get past the naive phase of things not working as you expect , there is a light at the end of the tunnel and ways to organise things so that they do work with human (or at least cultural) nature.
FooHentai 8y ago
>These days you can't even ban assholes without everyone making like you're the one with a problem. That's been true since always. Speaking as someone that was in that position within a few online communities back in ~98 or so. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
- intended 8y ago
  Yup - first line of advice I give to family now is "shut your social profiles, and get off of the internet. Failing which here are the things you need to look out for" and the proceed to list a fraction of the issues that I know about, and see them get uncomfortable.
  - marchdown 8y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing your list.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - reneherse 8y ago
      Yes, please share it.
      - intended 8y ago
        Gosh I've tried to write this list 3 times now and I've never felt anything was comprehensive enough to put on HN. So, hopefully the attempt will be sufficient - <speech boilerplate "want to protect my family, need to keep you informed, if you arent going to get off of the net, then you need to be prepared"> 1) Humor is being used to weaponize and radicalize people. A significant group of people who identify as alt right were first introdcued to the ideas via humor. Please be careful of off colour humor. You and me may think it is a joke with no bearing on reality. But there are people who think that its not a joke, and that the ideas behind it 2) Be ware whatsapp - I'm in India and there is a spate of lynchings in rural areas because of whatsapp forwards. People have been killed because they are suspected of being child abductors. I've personally seen the videos and they are horrific, they include videos of a live child being gutted - but its a gang video from mexico. Another video depicting an abduction, is from a child safety video in Pakistan - theyre spread between maids, drivers, auto-wallahs and office workers. An Indian state has tried to grapple with this problem by direct communication with the villages, by using drummers, warning people to not trust forwards. Tragically one of the people paid to inform people was himself killed, on suspicion of being a child abductor. 3) Increasing polarizaiton - What started out as mild jokes are expanding into massive cracks in the fabric of my world. A North/South Indian divide has grown from an occasional joke, to an often oozing wound. Online media carries no tone or body language; when people interact in this impoverished environment, our brains end up responding to the strongest emotional versions of a comment. Small fights end up creating lasting grudges. So don't EVER forward anything mildly polarizing and divisive. 4) Dont trust emotions - almost ANY item which generates an emotional response in you, should be treated as suspect. The best way people have to get you to stop thinking rationally, is by making you think emotionally. Other things that come to mind are fake news, and the nature of the media formats to keep people on it, and the entire behavioral science behind it. (Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, the network effect, responsive design, social approval and so on). A good point to bring up is depression, and the fact that material on social media is biased, few people talk about an average day or a terrible day or embarrassing things. Humans were not designed to be seduced into believing that the world is great for everyone else and average for me. ---- For the normal person listening in good faith, any one of those points is sufficient to create a sense of discomfort. But ultimately, the main driver is the fact that most people are already uncomfortable with social media and are sitting on a pile of bad experiences.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
...incredibly thankless people can be... I hear you. But to be fair can we generalize less and say __some__ people? I'd also venture to say that the internet has educated more people in the art of self-expression. Like any art, doing it, and being good at it are two different things. Simultaneously, we're over stimulated, and have become less tolerant of "feedback." I certainly not going to dispute The A-hole Factor. One of the reason I had shift from B&M retail + ecomm to strictly ecomm was I lost tolerance for being what amounted to an underpaid therapist. That was close to 20 yrs ago. I can only image the current state of things.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I hear you. But to be fair can we generalize less and say __some__ people? We could, but seemingly, if you've been in these situations, it's close to "all people".
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Yeah. I have been in such a situation, and it was not all people. It was a minority. They were what they always were. What changed was my tolerance to their antics. Mind you, this was pre-internet so perhaps giving all a voice online has led to too much input IRL.
- l0b0 8y ago
  I'm not an English native speaker, but I though "foo can be bar" was equivalent to "some foo are bar".
antt 8y ago
>Even if I had the time, money and expertise I would never do something like that. Invite only spaces. New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Anyone can be expelled for any reason at any time. It's amazing how much the tone changes when someone is on the line for breaking a 10k machine and having to pay for everyone else using an equivalent machine commercially while they get it fixed.
- gooseus 8y ago
  > New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Does that imply that if you vouch for a new member that you are also expelled if they are or share the cost of their fuckups?
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    lobste.rs does something similar: Invite only. But any member can hand out invites. If there's a trend however that you invite the wrong persons I think you can get banned or punished somehow yourself. Edit, exact rules: """There's no limit on how many invitations a user can send (though that might be prompted by scaling problems in the future). When accounts are banned for spam, sockpuppeting, or other abuse, moderators will look up the invitation tree to consider disabling their inviter's ability to send invitations or, rarely, also banning. """ Also there is a public list tree on the site of who invited who: https://lobste.rs/u https://lobste.rs/u
  - sincerely 8y ago
    some private torrent trackers do that and it works well
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Invite only spaces. New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Anyone can be expelled for any reason at any time. Will still end up being a problem if the intention is to preserve the original vision. Mentors change over time, and 2nd and 3rd generation members (mentors of mentors etc) will form gangs and have their own ideas of how things should be.
specialist 8y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. I've been chewing on an idea. Please bear with me. A friend's MBA thesis (WIP) is on the business model of evangelical churches. How the players build their flock, manage the brand, shape the culture, revenue, run their meetings, etc. Kinda eye opening. I'm even going to church again, a new one every few weeks. To gleen the strategies and techniques that have been hiding in plain sight. One of the volunteer orgs I work on (with?) is game. We've started making some changes, just to see how it plays out. If I could share one takeaway: The Field of Dreams "Built it and they will come" strategy doesn't work. Non-profits, communities, etc. need as much intent and effort as any other startup to succeed.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  These sorts of organizations wouldn't exist unless they were doing things right. Lots to learn for personal community projects.
- dunnevens 8y ago
  Your friend's thesis sounds very interesting. Does your friend run any sort of blog or post publicly? I'd be interested in seeing their work.
- stonecraftwolf 8y ago
  I’d also be interested in your friend’s work.
- wiz21c 8y ago
  >>> The Field of Dreams "Buit it and they will come" strategy doesn't work. could you elaborate on "why" ?
  - specialist 8y ago
    I don't know. Sorry. My best guesses is somewhere between "culture is hard" and The Tyranny of Structurelessness http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm thesis.
- 8y ago
mratzloff 8y ago
> A recent experience from a hackerspace showed me how incredibly thankless people can be. After working really insanely hard to build an inclusive space with loads of features, every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. They are clueless. It's like when developers on HN share all their ideas about being a manager and what's required.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  So doubling or tripling everyone's salaries, making workweeks 4 days of 6 hours each, and firing all business and management majors and replacing them with engineers is not the path to a successful company?
  - late2part 8y ago
    it worked for Google....
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      And if you ever have the opportunity to start a company at the dawn of a fundamentally new era of global economic activity, it might work for you too. Most people are likely more interested in what will work now however.
    - PakG1 8y ago
      Did it? https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-... https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...
    - late2part 8y ago
      I forgot to point out that this is tongue in cheek, lingua in maxillam as it were...
- wiz21c 8y ago
avip 8y ago
I don’t think there’s such a thing as “inclusive” long term prospering community. If you can’t ban a-holes you will lose all positive forces acting on your side.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  It's a balance between accepting and integrating everybody vs removing people who degrade the former.
  - antt 8y ago
    Having seen what happens when you don't ban any assholes, no, it's not a balance. You shoot first, shoot later and shoot again a couple of more times to make sure. All it takes is a few days for a community to turn toxic. The communities that ban people preemptively work, the ones that give them the benefit of the doubt don't.
coldtea 8y ago
>every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. Well, isn't that the default mode of "hobby revolutionaries" on everything?
Noos 8y ago
No one cares how hard you work when you open a business and keep it running. They aren't your friends, they are your customers, and the only reward you should expect is the cash they give you for the service or goods you provide. A point of the article should be that if you have to work insanely hard on your business and have to rely on volunteers or people like that, you need to not be in the business in the first place. Don't sink money to it, and just do something informal with people you trust; let them come over to use the tools in your own private workspace.
- creature 8y ago
  They were setting up a non-profit arts space. I don't feel like the customer/business relationship is a good fit there.

by l0b0 8y ago

shriphani 8y ago

gallery house in palo alto has an interesting model - membership comes with a volunteering requirement - it can't obviously reach the level of NY MOMA but it works well for Palo Alto and is a nice little gallery that has launched quite a few careers.

Hendrikto 8y ago
> volunteering requirement Isn’t that an oxymoron?
- maehwasu 8y ago
  Read as: "free work requirement"
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Not "free work" either. As payment for your membership, a work trade in return for the benefits of membership. Consumer cooperatives (which are actually legally _owned_ by their members, via member shares in the coop corporation) have been doing this forever. Like the famous (both loved and hated) Park Slope Food Coop [grocery store]. The Park Slope Coop simply calls it a "work requirement", and it is "2 hours and 45 minutes once every four weeks." The Park Slop coop is famous for crazy internal politics, so a work requirement is definitely no magic bullet against such. The Park Slope Coop is also loved by many though.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Another way to think about it is sweat equity. Habitat for Humanity is a great model here. In the HUD model, you hand out housing to poor people. Sometimes they take care of it and prosper, but usually not. Places get trashed, fixtures and copper ripped from the walls, and that's the end. You get "the projects." In the HFH model, recipients must have jobs, references, and commitment. They get ongoing support from HFH and the community, who come to help build their house. The recipients actually buy the houses with low-rate mortgages, plus they need to put in some sweat equity with HFH either working on their house or someone else's, or on a committee like fund raising. The result is a homeowner who takes pride in their house, who has the connections and support of their neighbors, and who is more likely to elevate the community, including neighbors who didn't qualify for HFH. There are some lessons here for a community space.
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    Wow, so Jimmy Carter really is one of the richest people in the world, if you count Habitat for Humanity sweat equity.
- shriphani 8y ago
  more like skin in the game maybe?

arkades 8y ago

As a big fan of hackerspaces, I’d love to hear more about your experiences.

tomcam 8y ago

Please write about your experience! Also, sorry you had to go through that.

antt 8y ago
Writing about it would drive you insane, here it is in image, gif and email form: https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com shitnoisebridgesays.tumblr.com A high point for me was getting my site ddos'd and ssh brute force attacked when I decided to run a course in another hacker space after being stuck for committee approval for 3 months. The saddest part is that I knew it would happen and scraped the site into a static html site served from nginx from a box that would could only be administered through a two hop tunnel. Then the guy who I know did it went around stalking me on social media telling everyone I ... I'll actually take my advice and just leave it there.
- teddyh 8y ago
  OT: Regarding Tumblr, what cookies do you need to allow nowadays to be able to read it? I haven’t been able to see Tumblr links for months, at least. All it does is redirect to the front page and prompt me to sign in.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    You can click "allow" to let you track them in obscure and unknowable ways. I gave up and let my adblock get them, but I should just have closed the tab.
- watwut 8y ago
  Wow, that sux. When you wrote about assholes up there, I imagined something waaay milder. Makes me appreciate people who organize these things a bit more.
- jurassic 8y ago
  Early in my career, I nearly quit tech because of a negative experience I had with some douchebros at a noisebridge javascript event. In retrospect those guys were just a couple insecure idiots and really not representative of the average tech man, but as a woman trying to break into the industry I thought that’s what I was going to have to deal with every day in every job. Nonetheless I persisted.

usgroup 8y ago

Yeah ... people . But the good news is that once you get past the naive phase of things not working as you expect , there is a light at the end of the tunnel and ways to organise things so that they do work with human (or at least cultural) nature.

FooHentai 8y ago

>These days you can't even ban assholes without everyone making like you're the one with a problem. That's been true since always. Speaking as someone that was in that position within a few online communities back in ~98 or so. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

intended 8y ago
Yup - first line of advice I give to family now is "shut your social profiles, and get off of the internet. Failing which here are the things you need to look out for" and the proceed to list a fraction of the issues that I know about, and see them get uncomfortable.
- marchdown 8y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing your list.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - reneherse 8y ago
    Yes, please share it.
    - intended 8y ago
      Gosh I've tried to write this list 3 times now and I've never felt anything was comprehensive enough to put on HN. So, hopefully the attempt will be sufficient - <speech boilerplate "want to protect my family, need to keep you informed, if you arent going to get off of the net, then you need to be prepared"> 1) Humor is being used to weaponize and radicalize people. A significant group of people who identify as alt right were first introdcued to the ideas via humor. Please be careful of off colour humor. You and me may think it is a joke with no bearing on reality. But there are people who think that its not a joke, and that the ideas behind it 2) Be ware whatsapp - I'm in India and there is a spate of lynchings in rural areas because of whatsapp forwards. People have been killed because they are suspected of being child abductors. I've personally seen the videos and they are horrific, they include videos of a live child being gutted - but its a gang video from mexico. Another video depicting an abduction, is from a child safety video in Pakistan - theyre spread between maids, drivers, auto-wallahs and office workers. An Indian state has tried to grapple with this problem by direct communication with the villages, by using drummers, warning people to not trust forwards. Tragically one of the people paid to inform people was himself killed, on suspicion of being a child abductor. 3) Increasing polarizaiton - What started out as mild jokes are expanding into massive cracks in the fabric of my world. A North/South Indian divide has grown from an occasional joke, to an often oozing wound. Online media carries no tone or body language; when people interact in this impoverished environment, our brains end up responding to the strongest emotional versions of a comment. Small fights end up creating lasting grudges. So don't EVER forward anything mildly polarizing and divisive. 4) Dont trust emotions - almost ANY item which generates an emotional response in you, should be treated as suspect. The best way people have to get you to stop thinking rationally, is by making you think emotionally. Other things that come to mind are fake news, and the nature of the media formats to keep people on it, and the entire behavioral science behind it. (Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, the network effect, responsive design, social approval and so on). A good point to bring up is depression, and the fact that material on social media is biased, few people talk about an average day or a terrible day or embarrassing things. Humans were not designed to be seduced into believing that the world is great for everyone else and average for me. ---- For the normal person listening in good faith, any one of those points is sufficient to create a sense of discomfort. But ultimately, the main driver is the fact that most people are already uncomfortable with social media and are sitting on a pile of bad experiences.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

...incredibly thankless people can be... I hear you. But to be fair can we generalize less and say __some__ people? I'd also venture to say that the internet has educated more people in the art of self-expression. Like any art, doing it, and being good at it are two different things. Simultaneously, we're over stimulated, and have become less tolerant of "feedback." I certainly not going to dispute The A-hole Factor. One of the reason I had shift from B&M retail + ecomm to strictly ecomm was I lost tolerance for being what amounted to an underpaid therapist. That was close to 20 yrs ago. I can only image the current state of things.

coldtea 8y ago
>I hear you. But to be fair can we generalize less and say __some__ people? We could, but seemingly, if you've been in these situations, it's close to "all people".
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Yeah. I have been in such a situation, and it was not all people. It was a minority. They were what they always were. What changed was my tolerance to their antics. Mind you, this was pre-internet so perhaps giving all a voice online has led to too much input IRL.
l0b0 8y ago
I'm not an English native speaker, but I though "foo can be bar" was equivalent to "some foo are bar".

antt 8y ago

>Even if I had the time, money and expertise I would never do something like that. Invite only spaces. New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Anyone can be expelled for any reason at any time. It's amazing how much the tone changes when someone is on the line for breaking a 10k machine and having to pay for everyone else using an equivalent machine commercially while they get it fixed.

gooseus 8y ago
> New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Does that imply that if you vouch for a new member that you are also expelled if they are or share the cost of their fuckups?
- reitanqild 8y ago
  lobste.rs does something similar: Invite only. But any member can hand out invites. If there's a trend however that you invite the wrong persons I think you can get banned or punished somehow yourself. Edit, exact rules: """There's no limit on how many invitations a user can send (though that might be prompted by scaling problems in the future). When accounts are banned for spam, sockpuppeting, or other abuse, moderators will look up the invitation tree to consider disabling their inviter's ability to send invitations or, rarely, also banning. """ Also there is a public list tree on the site of who invited who: https://lobste.rs/u https://lobste.rs/u
- sincerely 8y ago
  some private torrent trackers do that and it works well
coldtea 8y ago
>Invite only spaces. New members have mentors who are responsible for them. Anyone can be expelled for any reason at any time. Will still end up being a problem if the intention is to preserve the original vision. Mentors change over time, and 2nd and 3rd generation members (mentors of mentors etc) will form gangs and have their own ideas of how things should be.

specialist 8y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've been chewing on an idea. Please bear with me. A friend's MBA thesis (WIP) is on the business model of evangelical churches. How the players build their flock, manage the brand, shape the culture, revenue, run their meetings, etc. Kinda eye opening. I'm even going to church again, a new one every few weeks. To gleen the strategies and techniques that have been hiding in plain sight. One of the volunteer orgs I work on (with?) is game. We've started making some changes, just to see how it plays out. If I could share one takeaway: The Field of Dreams "Built it and they will come" strategy doesn't work. Non-profits, communities, etc. need as much intent and effort as any other startup to succeed.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
These sorts of organizations wouldn't exist unless they were doing things right. Lots to learn for personal community projects.
dunnevens 8y ago
Your friend's thesis sounds very interesting. Does your friend run any sort of blog or post publicly? I'd be interested in seeing their work.
stonecraftwolf 8y ago
I’d also be interested in your friend’s work.
wiz21c 8y ago
>>> The Field of Dreams "Buit it and they will come" strategy doesn't work. could you elaborate on "why" ?
- specialist 8y ago
  I don't know. Sorry. My best guesses is somewhere between "culture is hard" and The Tyranny of Structurelessness http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm thesis.
8y ago

mratzloff 8y ago

> A recent experience from a hackerspace showed me how incredibly thankless people can be. After working really insanely hard to build an inclusive space with loads of features, every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. They are clueless. It's like when developers on HN share all their ideas about being a manager and what's required.

smnrchrds 8y ago
So doubling or tripling everyone's salaries, making workweeks 4 days of 6 hours each, and firing all business and management majors and replacing them with engineers is not the path to a successful company?
- late2part 8y ago
  it worked for Google....
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    And if you ever have the opportunity to start a company at the dawn of a fundamentally new era of global economic activity, it might work for you too. Most people are likely more interested in what will work now however.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    Did it? https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-... https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...
  - late2part 8y ago
    I forgot to point out that this is tongue in cheek, lingua in maxillam as it were...
wiz21c 8y ago

avip 8y ago

I don’t think there’s such a thing as “inclusive” long term prospering community. If you can’t ban a-holes you will lose all positive forces acting on your side.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
It's a balance between accepting and integrating everybody vs removing people who degrade the former.
- antt 8y ago
  Having seen what happens when you don't ban any assholes, no, it's not a balance. You shoot first, shoot later and shoot again a couple of more times to make sure. All it takes is a few days for a community to turn toxic. The communities that ban people preemptively work, the ones that give them the benefit of the doubt don't.

coldtea 8y ago

>every little hobby revolutionary in the community just shits all over the work and proclaims the people actually getting stuff done should just stop and leave it to them. Well, isn't that the default mode of "hobby revolutionaries" on everything?

Noos 8y ago

No one cares how hard you work when you open a business and keep it running. They aren't your friends, they are your customers, and the only reward you should expect is the cash they give you for the service or goods you provide. A point of the article should be that if you have to work insanely hard on your business and have to rely on volunteers or people like that, you need to not be in the business in the first place. Don't sink money to it, and just do something informal with people you trust; let them come over to use the tools in your own private workspace.

creature 8y ago
They were setting up a non-profit arts space. I don't feel like the customer/business relationship is a good fit there.