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> racist trolling on the mailing list Is this a widespread problem in software-related communities? I'm genuinely asking, because if it is maybe I am just not

by skohan 6y ago

> racist trolling on the mailing list Is this a widespread problem in software-related communities? I'm genuinely asking, because if it is maybe I am just not aware of it, but for example in the open-source projects I have been involved with the conversations tend to be extremely focused on the subject matter, and I'm not even aware of the race or gender of the people I'm conversing with.

rleigh 6y ago
I have never encountered this in 23 years of participating in open source projects of all kinds. 20 years back (in Debian) there was some banter on the mailing lists, but never of that nature. It was mainly jokes about women. The community was primarily of young males, and that did stop as more women got involved. However, I should state for completeness that none of it was anything that anyone should have been banned over; sometimes a joke was just a joke, before humour was effectively outlawed lest anyone get even slightly offended.
jeltz 6y ago
I don't think so. I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source.
- wrsh07 6y ago
  If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery (This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?
    - wrsh07 6y ago
      > I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source Seems like a very generous reading of what the person I'm specifically responding to said
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I don’t see how you can possibly think that. Saying that you’ve never experienced something is not a claim that no one has ever experienced that thing. Mine is not a generous interpretation, but rather I’m not going out of my way to infer some nefarious subtext.
        wrsh07 6y ago
        I think the problem is essentially this: if you're a white male, you may essentially never experience or see racism / sexism in tech. If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it. If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread. The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2] I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc) [1] https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry [2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize
        skohan 6y ago
  - skohan 6y ago
    To be fair, the article in question is not about a software project, it's about an individual who is using github as a food blog being trolled using the github collaboration features. It's an example of horrible online behavior, but I don't think it's relevant to OSS communities.
    - wrsh07 6y ago
      I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites. However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous. Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators: > We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?
      - skohan 6y ago
        I'm not saying that open source communities are not in need of moderation. Of course they are, like any online community. Basically every open online forum is vulnerable to vulgar, hateful and abusive content being posted. The point this sub-thread is referring to, is that CoC's are there as: > a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this. And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.
        wrsh07 6y ago
        Of course you don't need a CoC to enforce anything! You can moderate aggressively without one. What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.
wrsh07 6y ago
In the c++ community[1] someone did just publicly announce that they were tired of the hostility so... yes https://thephd.github.io/the-community# https://thephd.github.io/the-community# [1] if you think this is "just a c++ problem" you're going to be very disappointed
- skohan 6y ago
  What are the author's actual complaints about the C++ community? Maybe I am lacking context, but it's extremely difficult for me to understand it by reading this blog post.
  - wrsh07 6y ago
    It's super inside baseball, sorry Background: The boost community has managed to lose a large number of very technically proficient people who were tired of dealing with racism/sexism JeanHeyd came to prominence a few years ago with some stellar open source libraries and gave some pretty good conference talks & joined the c++ committee. Throughout his continued work in the c++ community, he ran into a lot of... unnecessary, non-technical feedback. At some point, he got fed up with it all and created this. Within the c++ community there are people who are known to be particularly toxic, fwiw, and some of this is calling them out specifically. I think everyone who has attended a committee meeting knows who/what he is talking about. There's also an additional bit, where he managed a discord server for one of his open source projects. When discussing Black Is Tech, he got racist pushback. Hopefully this helps add a little bit of context. I don't think it's too important to understand the details. The tl;dr is that an extraordinary developer, speaker, committee member left the community because he found it to be hostile That's a fact, and it's one engineers should be reckoning with. Your actions matter.

by skohan 6y ago

rleigh 6y ago

I have never encountered this in 23 years of participating in open source projects of all kinds. 20 years back (in Debian) there was some banter on the mailing lists, but never of that nature. It was mainly jokes about women. The community was primarily of young males, and that did stop as more women got involved. However, I should state for completeness that none of it was anything that anyone should have been banned over; sometimes a joke was just a joke, before humour was effectively outlawed lest anyone get even slightly offended.

jeltz 6y ago

I don't think so. I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source.

wrsh07 6y ago
If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery (This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?
  - wrsh07 6y ago
    > I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source Seems like a very generous reading of what the person I'm specifically responding to said
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I don’t see how you can possibly think that. Saying that you’ve never experienced something is not a claim that no one has ever experienced that thing. Mine is not a generous interpretation, but rather I’m not going out of my way to infer some nefarious subtext.
      - wrsh07 6y ago
        I think the problem is essentially this: if you're a white male, you may essentially never experience or see racism / sexism in tech. If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it. If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread. The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2] I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc) [1] https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry [2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize
        skohan 6y ago
- skohan 6y ago
  To be fair, the article in question is not about a software project, it's about an individual who is using github as a food blog being trolled using the github collaboration features. It's an example of horrible online behavior, but I don't think it's relevant to OSS communities.
  - wrsh07 6y ago
    I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites. However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous. Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators: > We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?
    - skohan 6y ago
      I'm not saying that open source communities are not in need of moderation. Of course they are, like any online community. Basically every open online forum is vulnerable to vulgar, hateful and abusive content being posted. The point this sub-thread is referring to, is that CoC's are there as: > a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this. And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.
      - wrsh07 6y ago
        Of course you don't need a CoC to enforce anything! You can moderate aggressively without one. What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.

wrsh07 6y ago

In the c++ community[1] someone did just publicly announce that they were tired of the hostility so... yes https://thephd.github.io/the-community# https://thephd.github.io/the-community# [1] if you think this is "just a c++ problem" you're going to be very disappointed

skohan 6y ago
What are the author's actual complaints about the C++ community? Maybe I am lacking context, but it's extremely difficult for me to understand it by reading this blog post.
- wrsh07 6y ago
  It's super inside baseball, sorry Background: The boost community has managed to lose a large number of very technically proficient people who were tired of dealing with racism/sexism JeanHeyd came to prominence a few years ago with some stellar open source libraries and gave some pretty good conference talks & joined the c++ committee. Throughout his continued work in the c++ community, he ran into a lot of... unnecessary, non-technical feedback. At some point, he got fed up with it all and created this. Within the c++ community there are people who are known to be particularly toxic, fwiw, and some of this is calling them out specifically. I think everyone who has attended a committee meeting knows who/what he is talking about. There's also an additional bit, where he managed a discord server for one of his open source projects. When discussing Black Is Tech, he got racist pushback. Hopefully this helps add a little bit of context. I don't think it's too important to understand the details. The tl;dr is that an extraordinary developer, speaker, committee member left the community because he found it to be hostile That's a fact, and it's one engineers should be reckoning with. Your actions matter.