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> 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'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
> [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo... This is the kind of thing I'm asking about. Lots of numbers are trotted out but where's the actual data? Where's the methodology? The blurb says, "This talk will teach you, using quantified data and academic research from the social sciences, about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and how you can begin to repair it." Social science research has a dramatically poor replication rate, so on that basis alone I'm skeptical of the numbers even if he did interpret them correctly. That said, I agree asshole behaviour has to be reigned in, but exile is pretty dramatic if you really think about it. It's super easy and I think that's why people do it, but that doesn't make it good option.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  No one considers it a good option. It's usually the last option, done after a fair bit of mediation to try and improve the assholes behavior. Only when it's clear that they can't or won't do you ban.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Only when it's clear that they can't or won't do you ban. I'm saying that's still not a reasonable measure even in that case. Why not an exponential backoff, where the first measure is that they only get one post a day. If they want to be heard they have to be more careful in how they word things and they have more time to think about how it might be received. If they transgress again, then it's upped to every three days, then once a week, then once every other week, and so on. A total ban is the limit of this more nuanced process. No doubt this feature doesn't exist, so I'm suggesting something like this should be added because I'm not at all a fan of bans. Even this is a stopgap measure used to manage assholes because we don't yet understand what's at the root of asshole behaviour. Edit: to clarify, I mean the backoff/retry strategy is still not ideal, but an easy first attempt at trying to reframe this as a problem we can maybe address using programming abstractions to inhibit rather than facilitate communication. Most software is focused on reducing barriers to communication, which is why banning is the only recourse, but in cases like this you obviously want to raise barriers to communication in controlled ways so you don't have use the ban hammer.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > Social science research has a dramatically poor replication rate, so on that basis alone I'm skeptical of the numbers even if he did interpret them correctly. It's not a perfect science, but that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the best option, or that we can't just use common sense for that matter. If someone joins a community space and their first interaction is being insulted then the chance that they will come back is lower than if they're not insulted. I don't think you need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept this basic point, just as we don't need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept that dogs can feel pain, have an emotional life, have different personalities, etc. > That said, I agree asshole behaviour has to be reigned in, but exile is pretty dramatic if you really think about it. It's super easy and I think that's why people do it, but that doesn't make it good option. It sure is dramatic! Like I said, I don't really have the full story on this, so it's very hard for me to judge if it's proportional. I don't think the decision was made lightly as everyone involved realized it's not J. Random Gopher but a fairly well-known person within the community. Related story: in a community (unrelated to Go) I once sent a message to someone asking them not to insult people; pretty basic unambiguous "you can't call people idiots here" kind of stuff. They were also very helpful in other cases and I knew they were going to be sensitive about it, so I sent the kindest kid-gloves message I could come up with; no threats of any actions, just "hey, can you not do this here?" They just replied with "no, I will not change, fuck off". So ... I (temporarily) banned them. What else was I supposed to do at this point? Let them continue anyway even though it was clearly inappropriate? Anyone looking on might think "gosh, did you really have to ban them for those remarks? It wasn't that bad?" Not unreasonable, but ... they also weren't aware of the conversation I had with them, and their reply. No one made any remarks about it, but if they did, I wouldn't have commented on it because it's still a private conversation. This is the kind of stuff we may be unaware of. In my first message I mentioned "unreceptive to criticism of it (often getting pretty defensive/aggressive)" for a reason. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but from what I've seen in public cases where people commented on his behaviour I expect things didn't go swimmingly. It's one thing to screw up at times and at least acknowledge you screwed up, but it's quite another thing to be consistently dismissive about any concerns and outright reject the idea there is anything wrong with your behaviour. I expect that this attitude played a large factor in the decision.

naasking 4y ago

> [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo... This is the kind of thing I'm asking about. Lots of numbers are trotted out but where's the actual data? Where's the methodology? The blurb says, "This talk will teach you, using quantified data and academic research from the social sciences, about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and how you can begin to repair it." Social science research has a dramatically poor replication rate, so on that basis alone I'm skeptical of the numbers even if he did interpret them correctly. That said, I agree asshole behaviour has to be reigned in, but exile is pretty dramatic if you really think about it. It's super easy and I think that's why people do it, but that doesn't make it good option.

joshuamorton 4y ago
No one considers it a good option. It's usually the last option, done after a fair bit of mediation to try and improve the assholes behavior. Only when it's clear that they can't or won't do you ban.
- naasking 4y ago
  > Only when it's clear that they can't or won't do you ban. I'm saying that's still not a reasonable measure even in that case. Why not an exponential backoff, where the first measure is that they only get one post a day. If they want to be heard they have to be more careful in how they word things and they have more time to think about how it might be received. If they transgress again, then it's upped to every three days, then once a week, then once every other week, and so on. A total ban is the limit of this more nuanced process. No doubt this feature doesn't exist, so I'm suggesting something like this should be added because I'm not at all a fan of bans. Even this is a stopgap measure used to manage assholes because we don't yet understand what's at the root of asshole behaviour. Edit: to clarify, I mean the backoff/retry strategy is still not ideal, but an easy first attempt at trying to reframe this as a problem we can maybe address using programming abstractions to inhibit rather than facilitate communication. Most software is focused on reducing barriers to communication, which is why banning is the only recourse, but in cases like this you obviously want to raise barriers to communication in controlled ways so you don't have use the ban hammer.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> Social science research has a dramatically poor replication rate, so on that basis alone I'm skeptical of the numbers even if he did interpret them correctly. It's not a perfect science, but that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the best option, or that we can't just use common sense for that matter. If someone joins a community space and their first interaction is being insulted then the chance that they will come back is lower than if they're not insulted. I don't think you need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept this basic point, just as we don't need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept that dogs can feel pain, have an emotional life, have different personalities, etc. > That said, I agree asshole behaviour has to be reigned in, but exile is pretty dramatic if you really think about it. It's super easy and I think that's why people do it, but that doesn't make it good option. It sure is dramatic! Like I said, I don't really have the full story on this, so it's very hard for me to judge if it's proportional. I don't think the decision was made lightly as everyone involved realized it's not J. Random Gopher but a fairly well-known person within the community. Related story: in a community (unrelated to Go) I once sent a message to someone asking them not to insult people; pretty basic unambiguous "you can't call people idiots here" kind of stuff. They were also very helpful in other cases and I knew they were going to be sensitive about it, so I sent the kindest kid-gloves message I could come up with; no threats of any actions, just "hey, can you not do this here?" They just replied with "no, I will not change, fuck off". So ... I (temporarily) banned them. What else was I supposed to do at this point? Let them continue anyway even though it was clearly inappropriate? Anyone looking on might think "gosh, did you really have to ban them for those remarks? It wasn't that bad?" Not unreasonable, but ... they also weren't aware of the conversation I had with them, and their reply. No one made any remarks about it, but if they did, I wouldn't have commented on it because it's still a private conversation. This is the kind of stuff we may be unaware of. In my first message I mentioned "unreceptive to criticism of it (often getting pretty defensive/aggressive)" for a reason. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but from what I've seen in public cases where people commented on his behaviour I expect things didn't go swimmingly. It's one thing to screw up at times and at least acknowledge you screwed up, but it's quite another thing to be consistently dismissive about any concerns and outright reject the idea there is anything wrong with your behaviour. I expect that this attitude played a large factor in the decision.