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Peer pressure happens when someone like a teenager wants or has to be around some other peers (teenagers) but has to follow the whims of the peers in order to c

Peer pressure happens when someone like a teenager wants or has to be around some other peers (teenagers) but has to follow the whims of the peers in order to continue to be around them or to not be harassed by them. The peanut gallery of non-contributors are only peers in the sense that they pretend to speak on behalf of some OSS community. And the fact that they are spokespersons is by default suspect. The attacker is a peer in the sense of being a contributor. So is he a peer pressurer? Again we come back to the teenager who has to follow the whims of his peers in order to be included. The maintainer is already inside of his own playground. So the pressure to be part of the “community” is really the incredibly abstract thing that the peanut gallery was referring to: you ought to do so-and-so in order to be whatever I think of in my head as an OSS maintainer. This can be rejected out of hand if you really believe that maintainers don’t owe anyone anything (because of free labor). But this gets incoherent if you want to assert both of these things: 1. There is no social contract for OSS maintainers: they can toss their PC out of the window and go on a five-year pilgrimage without telling anyone 2. There is some community which has power over the maintainer to peer pressure them If you really want to double down on (1), the “cure” is what the OP suggested: say no and walk away.

stavros 3y ago
Many maintainers want to please their users, and be helpful (which is admirable, and more power to them), which means #2 applies. Sure, the maintainer is entitled to say "fuck you, I want to sit on my project and you can fork it if you want", but he was, presumably, trying to be helpful and succumbed to pressure. I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
- keybored 3y ago
  > Many maintainers want to please their users, and be helpful (which is admirable, and more power to them), which means #2 applies. Sure, the maintainer is entitled to say "fuck you, I want to sit on my project and you can fork it if you want", but he was, presumably, trying to be helpful and succumbed to pressure. All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit. In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery. In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties. > I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently. > Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either. The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”. In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people. The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721 [2] Like asking about whether someone has a moral obligation to eat healthy. It’s not about other people.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    > In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. Sure you do: everyone likes to comment on whether your volunteering work is an effective use of time and resources or not.
    - keybored 3y ago
      Not in my experience. People don’t complain about people doing pro-social volunteer work (IME).
      - saagarjha 3y ago
        I see a lot of people complaining about e.g. working on saving "some stupid animal" instead of solving hunger or similar.
o11c 3y ago
If you think peer pressure is most relevant to teenagers, you really need to sit down and rethink peer pressure.
- keybored 3y ago
  It is certainly the most obvious and kind of archetypal kind of peer pressure, which doesn’t mean that it’s exclusive to teenagers.
  - o11c 3y ago
    That's still thinking of it the wrong way. Peer pressure among adults is far more widespread and powerful than the limited peer pressure among teenagers.
    - keybored 3y ago
      What do you think like means?
saagarjha 3y ago
Maintainers have an obvious contract with their users, even for open source projects. Everyone thinks what “Jia Tan” is unacceptable, even though he’s an open source maintainer! You have an obligation to not cause harm to people who use your software.

stavros 3y ago

Many maintainers want to please their users, and be helpful (which is admirable, and more power to them), which means #2 applies. Sure, the maintainer is entitled to say "fuck you, I want to sit on my project and you can fork it if you want", but he was, presumably, trying to be helpful and succumbed to pressure. I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.

keybored 3y ago
> Many maintainers want to please their users, and be helpful (which is admirable, and more power to them), which means #2 applies. Sure, the maintainer is entitled to say "fuck you, I want to sit on my project and you can fork it if you want", but he was, presumably, trying to be helpful and succumbed to pressure. All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit. In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery. In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties. > I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently. > Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either. The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”. In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people. The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721 [2] Like asking about whether someone has a moral obligation to eat healthy. It’s not about other people.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  > In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. Sure you do: everyone likes to comment on whether your volunteering work is an effective use of time and resources or not.
  - keybored 3y ago
    Not in my experience. People don’t complain about people doing pro-social volunteer work (IME).
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      I see a lot of people complaining about e.g. working on saving "some stupid animal" instead of solving hunger or similar.

o11c 3y ago

If you think peer pressure is most relevant to teenagers, you really need to sit down and rethink peer pressure.

keybored 3y ago
It is certainly the most obvious and kind of archetypal kind of peer pressure, which doesn’t mean that it’s exclusive to teenagers.
- o11c 3y ago
  That's still thinking of it the wrong way. Peer pressure among adults is far more widespread and powerful than the limited peer pressure among teenagers.
  - keybored 3y ago
    What do you think like means?

saagarjha 3y ago

Maintainers have an obvious contract with their users, even for open source projects. Everyone thinks what “Jia Tan” is unacceptable, even though he’s an open source maintainer! You have an obligation to not cause harm to people who use your software.