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> I was also taken aback when Peter Bourgon, a great programmer and contributor to the go ecosystem was banned from all go channels. Bourgon was frequently hel

> I was also taken aback when Peter Bourgon, a great programmer and contributor to the go ecosystem was banned from all go channels. Bourgon was frequently helpful and great, but also frequently rude, condensing, dismissive, and generally just unpleasant. I've seen this countless of times first-hand on Slack, Reddit, and Lobsters. I specifically stopped interacting with him long before he was banned. Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. I kind of hate how it's brought up here because I think he's not a bad bloke at all and I know the entire situation caused great personal hurt to him. But that doesn't change that he was the kind of "brilliant jerk" that would chase people out of the community with his behaviour, and that he was unreceptive to criticism of it (often getting pretty defensive/aggressive). No one liked how all of this turned out, but it did make the Go community a better place. Being helpful yesterday doesn't cancel out being a jerk today. Same with Drew: he posted legitimate helpful issues. And he also ranted about how people were all a bunch of morons. I don't blame anyone for getting tired of that.

Semaphor 4y ago
> And he also ranted about how people were all a bunch of morons. I don't blame anyone for getting tired of that. Do you have a source?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  https://github.com/golang/go/issues/30141#issuecomment-464278183 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/30141#issuecomment-46427... I don't have a full list of all posts at hand (some of which may be removed), but I've seen some other similar stuff as well; it's not an isolated incident. I was reading through the previous thread on this issue (goproxy sending loads of requests) and this one was posted as an example there.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Thanks, that is indeed not the greatest of comments.
    - dcow 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - morelisp 4y ago
        > personal vendetta This is a weird definition of "personal", like PGP kicked his dog or something. The arguments he makes against it are detailed and the agreement of most working cryptographers, even if they don't agree with his specific deprecation schedule. Some people would call that "good engineering".
        dcow 4y ago
        “Good engineering” would be to meticulously develop and standardize a replacement before idealistically purging the world of alleged “bad software”. Since this endeavor has yet to be undertaken, PGP it is. Good engineers understand this reality. Look, you can make solid arguments till you are blue in the face about why PGP is unclean and unfit for modern cryptography. And you can be 100% right. But that doesn't mean people who disagree are wrong. There are 100% valid arguments and use cases for PGP too. It takes a mature personality to understand this nuance. And to understand that sharing a mic drop piece about why PGP sucks, getting your security buddies to laugh with you, and then trying to rip it out of existence is incredibly short sighted, ill mannered, and not in the least bit “good engineering”.
        SSLy 4y ago
        > develop and standardize a replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME ok, I jest.
        morelisp 4y ago
naasking 4y ago
> Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. I don't see why not. Personalities fall on a broad spectrum. Still seems strange to me that the recent broad pushes for more inclusiveness, including neuro-atypicality, does not cover people that inconvenience you personally. > that would chase people out of the community with his behaviour [...] but it did make the Go community a better place I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who have actually been chased away by rudeness. It no doubt causes great relief in the minds of those who dislike the exiled person, but it's always justified with a broader claim that "it's for the greater good". I understand comments can be non-constructive, and that some people are more prone to it, but total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously IMO.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is all I have. It's hard to get "hard evidence" for these kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"[1] from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and other projects. I'm not sure if it's easy to get these kind of numbers from e.g. Slack or Reddit though. [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-your-project-fosdem https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg > total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously. It wasn't the first time he was banned, but I'm not privy to the exact details on this. Was total "total exile" proportional? I don't know: obviously I didn't see everything. I just wanted to say he didn't "just" get banned over a minor thing, but after many years of problematic behaviour that had been raised plenty of times.
  - naasking 4y ago
wwarner 4y ago
I dunno, aren't people a bunch of morons when you really get down to it? Like, isn't that a legitimate complaint too? > Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. I'd make a distinction here between having a reputation as a great contributor and having something important and correct to say in a given exchange. No, a community shouldn't put up with a person with a great reputation (or elevated title or higher pay grade) if they are unpleasant and wrong. But if they're right and they're a little impatient or impulsive, the community has more to gain from listening and simply pointing out they don't need to be impatient and impulsive. Let him build up a reputation for being a jerk rather than just ban him.
- morelisp 4y ago
  > I dunno, aren't people a bunch of morons when you really get down to it? Like, isn't that a legitimate complaint too? It's still unproductive to say that in a community support space. Who's the bigger moron, the moron or the guy holding a public grudge for over a year about how unfair it is they're not letting him in the channel full of morons?
- lanstin 4y ago
  It is true but usually not useful to say. Start with the assumption he 80% of everything is crap and be happy about the exceptions but not really fussed at the crap. If you can’t do do these things, you lack the merit needed to work with others. You can always go off alone and do excellent stuff.
josephcsible 4y ago
> Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. Why not? Why shouldn't we offer more leeway to more valuable contributors?
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  The question is: how many other valuable contributors are you missing out on because of that person? The "classic" example of this is Ulrich Drepper, who maintained GNU libc for many years. Everyone agrees he's a great programmer. He's a better programmer than I am. But he was also ... difficult. More difficult than anyone else I've seen in a mainstream widely-used project. Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper. So even if we adopt a purely utilitarian attitude on this (and I don't think we should in the first place), I think it's still a bad idea to grant some people a license to be a jerk. In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    >Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. I have no numbers to be able to confirm or deny this, but... >Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper. ... Debian created eglibc because they needed glibc to support their use case and Drepper didn't. Even if Drepper had been the nicest person in the world, if he rejected patches to run glibc on non-x86 then forking was unavoidable.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    I don't think Ulrich Drepper is a good example. He wasn't just rude; he also blocked merging important changes. I think a better example is Linus Torvalds. > In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code. I think that you would most of the time.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  Why shouldn't better drivers get to ignore speed limits?
counttheforks 4y ago
> No one liked how all of this turned out, but it did make the Go community a better place Doubtful. Knowing that the Go team has a habit of ousting contributors because some feefees got hurt ensures that I'll never even consider trying to contribute.

Semaphor 4y ago

> And he also ranted about how people were all a bunch of morons. I don't blame anyone for getting tired of that. Do you have a source?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Beltalowda 4y ago
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/30141#issuecomment-464278183 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/30141#issuecomment-46427... I don't have a full list of all posts at hand (some of which may be removed), but I've seen some other similar stuff as well; it's not an isolated incident. I was reading through the previous thread on this issue (goproxy sending loads of requests) and this one was posted as an example there.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Thanks, that is indeed not the greatest of comments.
  - dcow 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - morelisp 4y ago
      > personal vendetta This is a weird definition of "personal", like PGP kicked his dog or something. The arguments he makes against it are detailed and the agreement of most working cryptographers, even if they don't agree with his specific deprecation schedule. Some people would call that "good engineering".
      - dcow 4y ago
        “Good engineering” would be to meticulously develop and standardize a replacement before idealistically purging the world of alleged “bad software”. Since this endeavor has yet to be undertaken, PGP it is. Good engineers understand this reality. Look, you can make solid arguments till you are blue in the face about why PGP is unclean and unfit for modern cryptography. And you can be 100% right. But that doesn't mean people who disagree are wrong. There are 100% valid arguments and use cases for PGP too. It takes a mature personality to understand this nuance. And to understand that sharing a mic drop piece about why PGP sucks, getting your security buddies to laugh with you, and then trying to rip it out of existence is incredibly short sighted, ill mannered, and not in the least bit “good engineering”.
        SSLy 4y ago
        > develop and standardize a replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME ok, I jest.
        morelisp 4y ago

naasking 4y ago

> Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. I don't see why not. Personalities fall on a broad spectrum. Still seems strange to me that the recent broad pushes for more inclusiveness, including neuro-atypicality, does not cover people that inconvenience you personally. > that would chase people out of the community with his behaviour [...] but it did make the Go community a better place I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who have actually been chased away by rudeness. It no doubt causes great relief in the minds of those who dislike the exiled person, but it's always justified with a broader claim that "it's for the greater good". I understand comments can be non-constructive, and that some people are more prone to it, but total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously IMO.

Beltalowda 4y ago
> I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is all I have. It's hard to get "hard evidence" for these kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"[1] from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and other projects. I'm not sure if it's easy to get these kind of numbers from e.g. Slack or Reddit though. [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-your-project-fosdem https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg > total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously. It wasn't the first time he was banned, but I'm not privy to the exact details on this. Was total "total exile" proportional? I don't know: obviously I didn't see everything. I just wanted to say he didn't "just" get banned over a minor thing, but after many years of problematic behaviour that had been raised plenty of times.
- naasking 4y ago

wwarner 4y ago

I dunno, aren't people a bunch of morons when you really get down to it? Like, isn't that a legitimate complaint too? > Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. I'd make a distinction here between having a reputation as a great contributor and having something important and correct to say in a given exchange. No, a community shouldn't put up with a person with a great reputation (or elevated title or higher pay grade) if they are unpleasant and wrong. But if they're right and they're a little impatient or impulsive, the community has more to gain from listening and simply pointing out they don't need to be impatient and impulsive. Let him build up a reputation for being a jerk rather than just ban him.

morelisp 4y ago
> I dunno, aren't people a bunch of morons when you really get down to it? Like, isn't that a legitimate complaint too? It's still unproductive to say that in a community support space. Who's the bigger moron, the moron or the guy holding a public grudge for over a year about how unfair it is they're not letting him in the channel full of morons?
lanstin 4y ago
It is true but usually not useful to say. Start with the assumption he 80% of everything is crap and be happy about the exceptions but not really fussed at the crap. If you can’t do do these things, you lack the merit needed to work with others. You can always go off alone and do excellent stuff.

josephcsible 4y ago

> Whether he's a great programmer/contributor not isn't really important here. Why not? Why shouldn't we offer more leeway to more valuable contributors?

Beltalowda 4y ago
The question is: how many other valuable contributors are you missing out on because of that person? The "classic" example of this is Ulrich Drepper, who maintained GNU libc for many years. Everyone agrees he's a great programmer. He's a better programmer than I am. But he was also ... difficult. More difficult than anyone else I've seen in a mainstream widely-used project. Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper. So even if we adopt a purely utilitarian attitude on this (and I don't think we should in the first place), I think it's still a bad idea to grant some people a license to be a jerk. In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  >Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. I have no numbers to be able to confirm or deny this, but... >Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper. ... Debian created eglibc because they needed glibc to support their use case and Drepper didn't. Even if Drepper had been the nicest person in the world, if he rejected patches to run glibc on non-x86 then forking was unavoidable.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I don't think Ulrich Drepper is a good example. He wasn't just rude; he also blocked merging important changes. I think a better example is Linus Torvalds. > In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code. I think that you would most of the time.
bigbillheck 4y ago
Why shouldn't better drivers get to ignore speed limits?

counttheforks 4y ago

> No one liked how all of this turned out, but it did make the Go community a better place Doubtful. Knowing that the Go team has a habit of ousting contributors because some feefees got hurt ensures that I'll never even consider trying to contribute.