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Absolutely, yes. A growing community needs healthy management in order to avoid reputational damage to the core language. There's no shortage of guidance to "st

Absolutely, yes. A growing community needs healthy management in order to avoid reputational damage to the core language. There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious"

bruce343434 5y ago
In my personal experience such statements are pretty rare actually.
- babyblueblanket 5y ago
  In my personal experience such statements are actually not rare among specific minorities, and only in spaces between those minorities. They will never be said in a public way, because it makes them targets. I've been pulled aside by fellow minorities and warned against communities I had expressed interest in in the past, always in private in confidential spaces.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    But what you're saying is that people will disagree about what communities are "toxic and non-serious". I might think that, e.g. much of the blockchain space easily matches that sort of description, but it would be harder to say whether that's a majority or minority viewpoint.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      The fact that people disagree is a reason to not have moderation... why?
      - jjk166 5y ago
        Because it's good for people to have and to share diverse opinions. The point of moderation is to prevent fringe elements from ruining something for everyone else, not to enforce homogeneity where consensus has yet to be formed.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Oh, I think they are not as rare as you think. People are actively deterred from, say, Linux kernel development because of the community.
  - cjaybo 5y ago
    Yet the kernel is one of the most successful OSS projects of all time. I'm not sure it makes your point very well.
    - OOPMan 5y ago
      Turns out asshole can make good software! It's almost as though software development skills aren't correlated with social skills...
      - zionic 5y ago
        Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev. We have significant, documented evidence of assholes producing world changing software. We can’t do the same for the inverse personality type, can we? I’d rather have amazing open source free software than the validation of a blue check mark.
        M2Ys4U 5y ago
        > Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev. Not unless you discount the idea that it could be even better software if those people hadn't been turned away...
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Have you ever tried learning PHP? Even the people that don’t actively work with it are toxic :P
- skavi 5y ago
  have you seen a thread discussing OCaml recently?
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    no, link?
- worik 5y ago
  OpenBSD
- yeputons 5y ago
  I openly advise my students to stay away from posting questions on StackOverflow and ask for help among their peers and teachers. At least until they're able to clearly grasp what the "Minimal Complete Verifiable Example" is, how to minimize code, and how to google problems with slight variations, which are not easy skills. It's not to say that StackOverflow is generally toxic. It is, though, unusable by beginners, and it's mostly by design. And I don't think there is a good way to communicate this to a beginner whose question has been just closed because it lacks details.
stackedinserter 5y ago
Examples? EDIT: it's remarkable that there's none, aside of "someone said something"
- s_m 5y ago
  Scala's community has a reputation for toxicity. I don't write Scala, so I don't know how deserved this is, but nevertheless the reputation exists.
  - hderms 5y ago
    I'd say there's a fair amount of public drama but the actual community is pretty chill nowadays i.e. gitter and the like
- nopcode 5y ago
  I've seen this being said about Elm, OpenBSD, ToxChat
- ocschwar 5y ago
  Emacs and Elisp.
- chubot 5y ago
  Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic, and it's something he wanted to avoid in Clojure. (I think it was in his HOPL talk). Also, I would say that help-bash@ and the bash IRC channel are pretty toxic. By "toxic" I mean that there's just a general culture of negativity, insults, hazing, and assuming the worst. There's definitely a thing where computer nerds try to one-up each other, and highly technical or obscure topics like Lisp and bash tend to bring that out. I have a memory of comp.lang.c being pretty bad too, but I didn't participate for that long, and this was long ago. Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)
  - segfaultbuserr 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
s9w 5y ago
In the real world, people stay away from rust _because_ of the politics and the coc
quotemstr 5y ago
Counterexample: Linux, GCC, Python, and practically the entire free software ecosystem from before the current crazy for hall-monitory-y supervision from above. It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself. It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities. > There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious" A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.
- couchand 5y ago
  Perhaps no user avoided it (though that seems unlikely), but can't you imagine why some contributors may have avoided it? Wouldn't that lack of potential contributions be a material loss for the project?
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    Who's to say that more contributors are turned off by Rust-style behavioral micromanagement? It's impossible to prove counterfactuals. All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
    - couchand 5y ago
      If your greatest concern is some technical artifact and not the human beings in the community around you, kindly go touch grass.
      - quotemstr 5y ago
        It is more important to produce great works than it is to adhere to the behavioral strictures of internet activists. 100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police? Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.
devmunchies 5y ago
in my short experience in software (7 years), it almost feels like there is more drama when a CoC mod team is involved. without a mod team, you will still boot trolls or resolve a dispute. I think it's better to have a judge who can step in and resolve a situation than proactive police when it comes to OSS moderation.
- nice_byte 5y ago
  in general, i believe in the effectiveness of running communities via benevolent dictatorship. a group that has good reputation among the rest of the members, gets to decide how disputes are resolved / who gets silenced, etc., without having to justify themselves against a byzantine set of rules. for many open source projects that hope to be used by the wider world, this governance model is unacceptable though.
- worik 5y ago
  Depends on your POV My POV is one of privilege (I hate that word and concept, but it fits here). Being part of the majority most of the ways you can slice IT - except I am older but that one was a change! In other fields I was made aware of what it is like to be part of other groups, and it can suck. I got married. My spouse took me on a tour playing "spot the detective". They got followed around shops in a way that never happens to me. When we stood together at a bar, they were served after me, every time. A lot of people here know this from personal experience, a lot of people here it is academic reality, a lot of people here simply do not understand. OK. Believe me, it is real I have been involved in groups that make efforts to embrace people from outside the main dominant (majority) slices (how ever you choose to slice it) and groups that do not. The former is much better. Rust has truly benefited from it. Those in the comfy majority, it turns out, benefit too. I do. Compare Rust and Swift (I use Swift professionally, Rust for fun) There is no comparison. Swift has so many corners that have not been rounded off. The ergonomics is mostly much worse (unwrap V ! is an exception). Memory management in Swift is almost non-existent, the threading model is appallingly bad. I could go on, but on one side is a vibrant community, on the other is a bunch of alphas, astroturf, and the weeds rolling through almost empty Apple forums. The mod teams are a very important part of making the community a good place, making the community a good place is crucial for making the technology good.
zionic 5y ago
In my experience the people who, when asked about the technical merits of X, immediately dive into value judgements of a “community” around it are best ignored. If these types of people are in leadership positions, it’s too late and you need to move. If they’re below you, then you need to limit their reach and upward mobility. Usually fair application of performance standards will flush them out anyways. Often people like that in your organization are shielded by a manager that’s protecting them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- temikus 5y ago
  Woah, mate. I think that way of thinking might be more-than-slightly career limiting. The community does play a role in the ecosystem you’re buying into. You will most likely need to send PR’s / bug reports in at some point. If the core team tends to ignore bugs/external contributions, it is a point to consider. Furthermore, if your first knee-jerk reaction to the behaviour you think undesirable in reports is to “limit their reach and upward mobility” I think you need to think seriously about what mentorship means.
tharne 5y ago
On average I've found projects with explicit CoC's to be more toxic than those projects without Coc's.
- worik 5y ago
  It would be illuminating if you could back that up with examples
- throwaway19937 5y ago
  This could be Berkson's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox) in action. Larger projects probably have more toxicity than smaller projects and are more likely to have a CoC. The result is that the two factors appear to be correlated even if they are independent variables.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zionic 5y ago
  We’re almost there, I’ve blacklisted all OSS with CoC from our products/services. We’re down to the last 2, in house rewrites have replaced the rest with superior performing alternatives. I would normally support pushing our clean sheet rewrites MIT, but I need a license that prohibits the addition of CoC in all derivative/downstream/forks. In the mean time I’ll settle for a competitive advantage.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    You might find this entertaining https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    You don’t use Linux?
Angius 5y ago
> A growing community needs healthy management Like this person being the executive director? https://archive.fo/f10KK https://archive.fo/f10KK
- M2Ys4U 5y ago
  That person is no longer the (interim) executive director. In fact the Foundation decided to go without anybody filling the post for a couple of months instead of them until they found a permanent replacement - which they did just days ago.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I mean with this, the rust evangelical strike force, and the drama around actix-web - I'm not getting great vibes from the rust community.
klabb3 5y ago
> There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious" Absolutely, but the remedy is often worse than the illness. Codifying good behavior - and in particular policing language - tends to become a bureaucratic and endless black-hole project that sucks up all energy and resources, no matter the justification. There is no shortage of moralists in this world. A common misconception is that by declaring you are against toxicity, you cannot yourself be toxic. In reality, there is no such silver bullet. Toxic behavior is either deliberate or unconscious. If you want to be an asshole, there's plenty of room within the guidelines - it thrives within wokeness, meritocracies and BDFL-run projects alike. And if you don't think you're an asshole, not even the best CoC will change your mind. There's no shortcut here, you have to confront people directly with concrete criticism, and allow them to change, or in rare cases remove them. For instance, Linus toned his style down after realizing the effect it had on people, not from reading the sacred CoC scrolls. In fact, I have never seen or heard anyone who has meaningfully changed their behavior from a CoC.
blindmute 5y ago
> avoid reputational damage In less censored circles, Rust has THE worst reputation of any programming language purely because of this kind of management. The entire reputation of Rust is "that language made by insane leftists... with some memory safety or something". I've never seen any language community with a worse reputation, including JS.
- twic 5y ago
  "less censored circles" is a wonderful euphemism for, i assume, some cave full of idiots. Meanwhile, above ground, JavaScript, Ruby, Haskell, and Scala all have worse reputations than Rust.
ok123456 5y ago
Absolutely, no. Bureaucracy is not a substitution for being properly socialized and knowing how to interact with colleagues. In an earlier time they called this good breeding. Setting up little etiquette kangaroo courts with the power to arbitrate who is allowed to remain in the community is just fundamentally alienating.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I have never seen that on the table to be honest, certainly not on implementation language topics. There was some uncertainty with Java and licencing that I remember, but it is mostly about the issue on how to acquire talent. People tend to be careful with Rust because it is a relatively young language. Many medium sized business don't have much capacity to experiment but would still try it without too much convincing. Far more relevant it access to professionals that have experience with the language. That is something that grows very slowly. The JS community is pretty "expressive", but it is still a popular choice because you find a lot of people with experience here. My boss would expect all these nerds to behave badly anyway. I doubt he will ever change his opinion but the next generation might.

bruce343434 5y ago

In my personal experience such statements are pretty rare actually.

babyblueblanket 5y ago
In my personal experience such statements are actually not rare among specific minorities, and only in spaces between those minorities. They will never be said in a public way, because it makes them targets. I've been pulled aside by fellow minorities and warned against communities I had expressed interest in in the past, always in private in confidential spaces.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  But what you're saying is that people will disagree about what communities are "toxic and non-serious". I might think that, e.g. much of the blockchain space easily matches that sort of description, but it would be harder to say whether that's a majority or minority viewpoint.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    The fact that people disagree is a reason to not have moderation... why?
    - jjk166 5y ago
      Because it's good for people to have and to share diverse opinions. The point of moderation is to prevent fringe elements from ruining something for everyone else, not to enforce homogeneity where consensus has yet to be formed.
whimsicalism 5y ago
Oh, I think they are not as rare as you think. People are actively deterred from, say, Linux kernel development because of the community.
- cjaybo 5y ago
  Yet the kernel is one of the most successful OSS projects of all time. I'm not sure it makes your point very well.
  - OOPMan 5y ago
    Turns out asshole can make good software! It's almost as though software development skills aren't correlated with social skills...
    - zionic 5y ago
      Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev. We have significant, documented evidence of assholes producing world changing software. We can’t do the same for the inverse personality type, can we? I’d rather have amazing open source free software than the validation of a blue check mark.
      - M2Ys4U 5y ago
        > Sounds like an argument to keep the feels police out of software dev. Not unless you discount the idea that it could be even better software if those people hadn't been turned away...
Aeolun 5y ago
Have you ever tried learning PHP? Even the people that don’t actively work with it are toxic :P
skavi 5y ago
have you seen a thread discussing OCaml recently?
- bruce343434 5y ago
  no, link?
worik 5y ago
OpenBSD
yeputons 5y ago
I openly advise my students to stay away from posting questions on StackOverflow and ask for help among their peers and teachers. At least until they're able to clearly grasp what the "Minimal Complete Verifiable Example" is, how to minimize code, and how to google problems with slight variations, which are not easy skills. It's not to say that StackOverflow is generally toxic. It is, though, unusable by beginners, and it's mostly by design. And I don't think there is a good way to communicate this to a beginner whose question has been just closed because it lacks details.

stackedinserter 5y ago

Examples? EDIT: it's remarkable that there's none, aside of "someone said something"

s_m 5y ago
Scala's community has a reputation for toxicity. I don't write Scala, so I don't know how deserved this is, but nevertheless the reputation exists.
- hderms 5y ago
  I'd say there's a fair amount of public drama but the actual community is pretty chill nowadays i.e. gitter and the like
nopcode 5y ago
I've seen this being said about Elm, OpenBSD, ToxChat
ocschwar 5y ago
Emacs and Elisp.
chubot 5y ago
Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic, and it's something he wanted to avoid in Clojure. (I think it was in his HOPL talk). Also, I would say that help-bash@ and the bash IRC channel are pretty toxic. By "toxic" I mean that there's just a general culture of negativity, insults, hazing, and assuming the worst. There's definitely a thing where computer nerds try to one-up each other, and highly technical or obscure topics like Lisp and bash tend to bring that out. I have a memory of comp.lang.c being pretty bad too, but I didn't participate for that long, and this was long ago. Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)
- segfaultbuserr 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

s9w 5y ago

In the real world, people stay away from rust _because_ of the politics and the coc

quotemstr 5y ago

Counterexample: Linux, GCC, Python, and practically the entire free software ecosystem from before the current crazy for hall-monitory-y supervision from above. It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself. It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities. > There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious" A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.

couchand 5y ago
Perhaps no user avoided it (though that seems unlikely), but can't you imagine why some contributors may have avoided it? Wouldn't that lack of potential contributions be a material loss for the project?
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Who's to say that more contributors are turned off by Rust-style behavioral micromanagement? It's impossible to prove counterfactuals. All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
  - couchand 5y ago
    If your greatest concern is some technical artifact and not the human beings in the community around you, kindly go touch grass.
    - quotemstr 5y ago
      It is more important to produce great works than it is to adhere to the behavioral strictures of internet activists. 100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police? Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.

devmunchies 5y ago

in my short experience in software (7 years), it almost feels like there is more drama when a CoC mod team is involved. without a mod team, you will still boot trolls or resolve a dispute. I think it's better to have a judge who can step in and resolve a situation than proactive police when it comes to OSS moderation.

nice_byte 5y ago
in general, i believe in the effectiveness of running communities via benevolent dictatorship. a group that has good reputation among the rest of the members, gets to decide how disputes are resolved / who gets silenced, etc., without having to justify themselves against a byzantine set of rules. for many open source projects that hope to be used by the wider world, this governance model is unacceptable though.
worik 5y ago
Depends on your POV My POV is one of privilege (I hate that word and concept, but it fits here). Being part of the majority most of the ways you can slice IT - except I am older but that one was a change! In other fields I was made aware of what it is like to be part of other groups, and it can suck. I got married. My spouse took me on a tour playing "spot the detective". They got followed around shops in a way that never happens to me. When we stood together at a bar, they were served after me, every time. A lot of people here know this from personal experience, a lot of people here it is academic reality, a lot of people here simply do not understand. OK. Believe me, it is real I have been involved in groups that make efforts to embrace people from outside the main dominant (majority) slices (how ever you choose to slice it) and groups that do not. The former is much better. Rust has truly benefited from it. Those in the comfy majority, it turns out, benefit too. I do. Compare Rust and Swift (I use Swift professionally, Rust for fun) There is no comparison. Swift has so many corners that have not been rounded off. The ergonomics is mostly much worse (unwrap V ! is an exception). Memory management in Swift is almost non-existent, the threading model is appallingly bad. I could go on, but on one side is a vibrant community, on the other is a bunch of alphas, astroturf, and the weeds rolling through almost empty Apple forums. The mod teams are a very important part of making the community a good place, making the community a good place is crucial for making the technology good.

zionic 5y ago

In my experience the people who, when asked about the technical merits of X, immediately dive into value judgements of a “community” around it are best ignored. If these types of people are in leadership positions, it’s too late and you need to move. If they’re below you, then you need to limit their reach and upward mobility. Usually fair application of performance standards will flush them out anyways. Often people like that in your organization are shielded by a manager that’s protecting them.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
temikus 5y ago
Woah, mate. I think that way of thinking might be more-than-slightly career limiting. The community does play a role in the ecosystem you’re buying into. You will most likely need to send PR’s / bug reports in at some point. If the core team tends to ignore bugs/external contributions, it is a point to consider. Furthermore, if your first knee-jerk reaction to the behaviour you think undesirable in reports is to “limit their reach and upward mobility” I think you need to think seriously about what mentorship means.

tharne 5y ago

On average I've found projects with explicit CoC's to be more toxic than those projects without Coc's.

worik 5y ago
It would be illuminating if you could back that up with examples
throwaway19937 5y ago
This could be Berkson's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox) in action. Larger projects probably have more toxicity than smaller projects and are more likely to have a CoC. The result is that the two factors appear to be correlated even if they are independent variables.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zionic 5y ago
We’re almost there, I’ve blacklisted all OSS with CoC from our products/services. We’re down to the last 2, in house rewrites have replaced the rest with superior performing alternatives. I would normally support pushing our clean sheet rewrites MIT, but I need a license that prohibits the addition of CoC in all derivative/downstream/forks. In the mean time I’ll settle for a competitive advantage.
- blindmute 5y ago
  You might find this entertaining https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  You don’t use Linux?

Angius 5y ago

> A growing community needs healthy management Like this person being the executive director? https://archive.fo/f10KK https://archive.fo/f10KK

M2Ys4U 5y ago
That person is no longer the (interim) executive director. In fact the Foundation decided to go without anybody filling the post for a couple of months instead of them until they found a permanent replacement - which they did just days ago.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I mean with this, the rust evangelical strike force, and the drama around actix-web - I'm not getting great vibes from the rust community.

klabb3 5y ago

> There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious" Absolutely, but the remedy is often worse than the illness. Codifying good behavior - and in particular policing language - tends to become a bureaucratic and endless black-hole project that sucks up all energy and resources, no matter the justification. There is no shortage of moralists in this world. A common misconception is that by declaring you are against toxicity, you cannot yourself be toxic. In reality, there is no such silver bullet. Toxic behavior is either deliberate or unconscious. If you want to be an asshole, there's plenty of room within the guidelines - it thrives within wokeness, meritocracies and BDFL-run projects alike. And if you don't think you're an asshole, not even the best CoC will change your mind. There's no shortcut here, you have to confront people directly with concrete criticism, and allow them to change, or in rare cases remove them. For instance, Linus toned his style down after realizing the effect it had on people, not from reading the sacred CoC scrolls. In fact, I have never seen or heard anyone who has meaningfully changed their behavior from a CoC.

blindmute 5y ago

> avoid reputational damage In less censored circles, Rust has THE worst reputation of any programming language purely because of this kind of management. The entire reputation of Rust is "that language made by insane leftists... with some memory safety or something". I've never seen any language community with a worse reputation, including JS.

twic 5y ago
"less censored circles" is a wonderful euphemism for, i assume, some cave full of idiots. Meanwhile, above ground, JavaScript, Ruby, Haskell, and Scala all have worse reputations than Rust.

ok123456 5y ago

Absolutely, no. Bureaucracy is not a substitution for being properly socialized and knowing how to interact with colleagues. In an earlier time they called this good breeding. Setting up little etiquette kangaroo courts with the power to arbitrate who is allowed to remain in the community is just fundamentally alienating.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I have never seen that on the table to be honest, certainly not on implementation language topics. There was some uncertainty with Java and licencing that I remember, but it is mostly about the issue on how to acquire talent. People tend to be careful with Rust because it is a relatively young language. Many medium sized business don't have much capacity to experiment but would still try it without too much convincing. Far more relevant it access to professionals that have experience with the language. That is something that grows very slowly. The JS community is pretty "expressive", but it is still a popular choice because you find a lot of people with experience here. My boss would expect all these nerds to behave badly anyway. I doubt he will ever change his opinion but the next generation might.