4 ms·

The emotional impact of stuff like this is never apparent from the outside. For many many technical decisions there is no right answer, and any decision will th

by csours 6y ago

The emotional impact of stuff like this is never apparent from the outside. For many many technical decisions there is no right answer, and any decision will the be the wrong one for someone. In fact, even making a decision may be the wrong thing to do. Making a decision in this context is real emotional work. I strongly empathise with Sawyer X, having recently gone through a process where I had to come up with a document format and feeling the pressure to just make a decision.

mbauman 6y ago
And then the very decision to step back must be weighted against the fact that there will be highly visible public commentary like this very thread, raking your passion project over the coals and questioning your experiences and motives.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I'm starting to worry that the FOSS model is sub-optimal, because it fails to take these sorts of human factors into account. We've created a social landscape that is more hospitable to project leaders who enjoy conflict, or are at least less emotionally impacted by it.
- thrower123 6y ago
  The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. Twitter and Github are like cranking the volume knob from 1 to 11, and those kinds of arguments are simultaneously very low signal, and directly activate people's fight-or-flight responses. There seems to be a lot of instances lately of people that just can't unplug from the rage-machine in a healthy way, without flipping the table and doing an Eric Cartman.
  - matthewpersico 6y ago
    *THIS** If ever a collection of words thrown together has outpunched its weight, it is this! Brilliant! And I will be using it often, with reference to thrower123 on ycombinator. Just. Ducking. Brilliant.
  - anarazel 6y ago
    I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Hard-to-work-with individual have been a problem in open source projects for a long time. What I think is changing is less the personalities of new contributors and more that [sub]projects controlled/significantly influenced by such personalities are getting harder and harder to route around. It's feasible to fork a project / create an alternative if that's single-digit person-year/year of effort. There's plenty historical examples of that. If however maintaining / creating an alternative would take very significant resources, it's only going to happen if some large corporation foots the bill. Which has its own problems.
  - btilly 6y ago
    The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think. A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-perl-6 http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p... describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall. The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current. People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly.
Netcob 6y ago
I have a lot of respect for people involved in free software communities and projects. I've interacted with some maintainers in bug reports / feature requests and so far that has been extremely positive. But I haven't been part of any internet-based communities since I was a teenager. Having to argue about technical details in a non-constructive way is bad enough when you're getting paid for it - doing that when your main goal is to be a part of something useful to the world seems completely soul-crushing. I think if I ever code something worthwhile I'll probably just vomit it into a github repo for anyone to fork as they please.
- rolandog 6y ago
  Agreed. The manner in which people treat developers is appalling to me, and definitely gives me pause before considering releasing something to the public (if I will be beholden to serve at the whim of a belittling bully / choosing beggar).

by csours 6y ago

mbauman 6y ago

And then the very decision to step back must be weighted against the fact that there will be highly visible public commentary like this very thread, raking your passion project over the coals and questioning your experiences and motives.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I'm starting to worry that the FOSS model is sub-optimal, because it fails to take these sorts of human factors into account. We've created a social landscape that is more hospitable to project leaders who enjoy conflict, or are at least less emotionally impacted by it.

thrower123 6y ago
The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. Twitter and Github are like cranking the volume knob from 1 to 11, and those kinds of arguments are simultaneously very low signal, and directly activate people's fight-or-flight responses. There seems to be a lot of instances lately of people that just can't unplug from the rage-machine in a healthy way, without flipping the table and doing an Eric Cartman.
- matthewpersico 6y ago
  *THIS** If ever a collection of words thrown together has outpunched its weight, it is this! Brilliant! And I will be using it often, with reference to thrower123 on ycombinator. Just. Ducking. Brilliant.
- anarazel 6y ago
  I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Hard-to-work-with individual have been a problem in open source projects for a long time. What I think is changing is less the personalities of new contributors and more that [sub]projects controlled/significantly influenced by such personalities are getting harder and harder to route around. It's feasible to fork a project / create an alternative if that's single-digit person-year/year of effort. There's plenty historical examples of that. If however maintaining / creating an alternative would take very significant resources, it's only going to happen if some large corporation foots the bill. Which has its own problems.
- btilly 6y ago
  The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think. A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-perl-6 http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p... describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall. The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current. People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly.

Netcob 6y ago

I have a lot of respect for people involved in free software communities and projects. I've interacted with some maintainers in bug reports / feature requests and so far that has been extremely positive. But I haven't been part of any internet-based communities since I was a teenager. Having to argue about technical details in a non-constructive way is bad enough when you're getting paid for it - doing that when your main goal is to be a part of something useful to the world seems completely soul-crushing. I think if I ever code something worthwhile I'll probably just vomit it into a github repo for anyone to fork as they please.

rolandog 6y ago
Agreed. The manner in which people treat developers is appalling to me, and definitely gives me pause before considering releasing something to the public (if I will be beholden to serve at the whim of a belittling bully / choosing beggar).