5 ms·

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
  > 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) I strongly agree. I was reading the archive of an early infosec group the other day, the culture was extremely hostile. 70% of the posts were insightful technical discussions, the remaining 30% was full of personal attacks and name callings, merely reading those posts made me want to throw my computer out of the window. I'm not saying HN is great, but to give a sense of scale: on HN, that type of posts would be flagged to death almost immediately.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Infosec seems to have its share of angry people in general. One notable blog you’ll see on here from time to time generally has informative or moderate content, but the comments always seem to be a bunch of pointless shouting at things not really related to the post.
  - nice_byte 5y ago
    I think what people sometimes mean when they say "HN is toxic", is raging incompetence paraded with confidence (and getting upvoted), which I've seen many a time here. Similar to reddit.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic This is an interesting topic I try to stay away from here, for obvious reasons, but so many lisp communities I’ve seen seem to form around these cult of personalities or have the most, err.. eccentric members. More so than any language I’ve seen. People like to joke about Haskell programmers being cult like, but I’ve been down some really wild rabbit holes with lisp. Ironically I recall some allegations against Hickey a while back that if true would land him in that category.
  - OOPMan 5y ago
    Well, as the saying goes...it takes one to know one ;-)
canaus 5y ago
Hacker News. There's an entire subreddit based off of the comments on here.

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
> 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) I strongly agree. I was reading the archive of an early infosec group the other day, the culture was extremely hostile. 70% of the posts were insightful technical discussions, the remaining 30% was full of personal attacks and name callings, merely reading those posts made me want to throw my computer out of the window. I'm not saying HN is great, but to give a sense of scale: on HN, that type of posts would be flagged to death almost immediately.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Infosec seems to have its share of angry people in general. One notable blog you’ll see on here from time to time generally has informative or moderate content, but the comments always seem to be a bunch of pointless shouting at things not really related to the post.
- nice_byte 5y ago
  I think what people sometimes mean when they say "HN is toxic", is raging incompetence paraded with confidence (and getting upvoted), which I've seen many a time here. Similar to reddit.
the_only_law 5y ago
> Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic This is an interesting topic I try to stay away from here, for obvious reasons, but so many lisp communities I’ve seen seem to form around these cult of personalities or have the most, err.. eccentric members. More so than any language I’ve seen. People like to joke about Haskell programmers being cult like, but I’ve been down some really wild rabbit holes with lisp. Ironically I recall some allegations against Hickey a while back that if true would land him in that category.
- OOPMan 5y ago
  Well, as the saying goes...it takes one to know one ;-)

canaus 5y ago

Hacker News. There's an entire subreddit based off of the comments on here.