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We go quite a bit further than keeping out hate speech. For example, we have a policy of "good vibes" in the chat so we don't permit bashing other languages and

by lpil 2y ago

We go quite a bit further than keeping out hate speech. For example, we have a policy of "good vibes" in the chat so we don't permit bashing other languages and will publicly ask folks to take it elsewhere if they start. It's been a few years of using these policies and it's going great! The community and discord server have been consistently praised as one of the highlights of Gleam. The main drawback is that we tend to attract a lot of criticism from right-wing social media posters as a result, bizarrely including one brief smear campaign from one of the founders of Trump's Truth Social.

lolinder 2y ago
Well, thanks for being up front about it I guess! It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric—I'm glad that the relatively small subset of the population that you're interested in supporting has enjoyed the environment you've created, but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute. There are a lot of people from every part of political manifold that are uncomfortable with the growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort, and those people aren't interested in participating in a community where everything has to have "good vibes". For myself, I love the quote in dang's profile: > "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression." — Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943
- lpil 2y ago
  > but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute. Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space. Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    You're occupying a very special niche (typed BEAM language), so if I were you I'd be wary of attributing your growth to your moderation practices. Correlation and causation and all that. My prediction is that you grow rapidly because of natural interest in the niche you occupy. Your community will get larger and more diverse than you expect in spite of your efforts to keep people out. Then, when you run into your first major point of conflict about language development, the community will be divided on what to do and your efforts to moderate in this way will only fan the flames. Then Gleam will go the way of Elm—it will go back to being something that a very small niche group keeps using, but the bulk of the excitement will go back to Elixir as it slowly starts to occupy your technical niche. A community with no mechanism for dealing with conflict cannot last long. If being an Elm sounds fine to you—it's not a bad fate after all—then that's fine! Just don't expect more unless you're willing to start developing conflict tolerance in the community.
    - lpil 2y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding here. We have very robust mechanisms for dealing with conflict and we have been successfully employing them for years. We have also consulted with moderators of much larger communities and very confident with how it is going. Not sure what you mean about the Elm remark. They took the approach you're advocating for and have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
      - lolinder 2y ago

by lpil 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

Well, thanks for being up front about it I guess! It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric—I'm glad that the relatively small subset of the population that you're interested in supporting has enjoyed the environment you've created, but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute. There are a lot of people from every part of political manifold that are uncomfortable with the growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort, and those people aren't interested in participating in a community where everything has to have "good vibes". For myself, I love the quote in dang's profile: > "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression." — Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943

lpil 2y ago
> but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute. Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space. Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.
- lolinder 2y ago
  You're occupying a very special niche (typed BEAM language), so if I were you I'd be wary of attributing your growth to your moderation practices. Correlation and causation and all that. My prediction is that you grow rapidly because of natural interest in the niche you occupy. Your community will get larger and more diverse than you expect in spite of your efforts to keep people out. Then, when you run into your first major point of conflict about language development, the community will be divided on what to do and your efforts to moderate in this way will only fan the flames. Then Gleam will go the way of Elm—it will go back to being something that a very small niche group keeps using, but the bulk of the excitement will go back to Elixir as it slowly starts to occupy your technical niche. A community with no mechanism for dealing with conflict cannot last long. If being an Elm sounds fine to you—it's not a bad fate after all—then that's fine! Just don't expect more unless you're willing to start developing conflict tolerance in the community.
  - lpil 2y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding here. We have very robust mechanisms for dealing with conflict and we have been successfully employing them for years. We have also consulted with moderators of much larger communities and very confident with how it is going. Not sure what you mean about the Elm remark. They took the approach you're advocating for and have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
    - lolinder 2y ago