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The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment. Return t

by nullc 2y ago

The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment. Return to Cathedral.

jakelazaroff 2y ago
> Return to Cathedral. What does this mean?
- immibis 2y ago
  A closed-off development team releases what they want, and you take it or leave it, like sqlite.
- maztaim 2y ago
  FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
- jballanc 2y ago
  It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux. Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    > ...where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux. The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
    - jballanc 2y ago
      Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.
  - chongli 2y ago
    I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged. This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
    - jballanc 2y ago
      Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).
pino82 2y ago
It's an intentionally edgy statement, got it... The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed. It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.
anthk 2y ago
'DOS" retro pseudo-hackers [crackers] always have been a cancer like this, sadly. Elitism, tons of gatekeeping that would even blush most *BSD users, code stealing, non-acreditation... basically the opposite of the public FOSS/Nix/Lisp world. They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems. Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too. In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX. A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
dkkergoog 2y ago
[dead]
Gormo 2y ago
Or just put a fence around the bazaar.
arp242 2y ago
Eh, it was never any different. Have you seen the mailing lists of the 90s? There were lots of very bitter, vitriolic, long-running feuds going on.
- nullc 2y ago
  I was there, I'm personally convinced it's much worse now. Perhaps I'm suffering from rose colored glasses, wouldn't be the first time. My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion. Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
  - arp242 2y ago
    It's just because there are more people online compared to the 90s. If 1% of people are extremely excessively unpleasant, then with 100 people that's one person. With 1,000 people then that's 10 people, with 10,000 people that's 100 people, etc. There's maybe 10 million developers involved today? So that's 100,000 people. It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
    - nullc 2y ago
      I agree that scale is the bigger factor, but the infrastructure matters too: Consider invite only vs writable-by-everyone default. Open source development moved from a lot more invite based in the mid 90s to a strong writable-by-everyone social media model particularly with the adoption of Github vs svn/cvs. But the scale issue is an argument that open source should have been going in the opposite direction. More unpleasant actors means more justification for reducing participation.

by nullc 2y ago

The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment. Return to Cathedral.

jakelazaroff 2y ago

> Return to Cathedral. What does this mean?

immibis 2y ago
A closed-off development team releases what they want, and you take it or leave it, like sqlite.
maztaim 2y ago
FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
jballanc 2y ago
It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux. Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > ...where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux. The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
  - jballanc 2y ago
    Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.
- chongli 2y ago
  I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged. This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
  - jballanc 2y ago
    Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).

pino82 2y ago

It's an intentionally edgy statement, got it... The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed. It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.

anthk 2y ago

'DOS" retro pseudo-hackers [crackers] always have been a cancer like this, sadly. Elitism, tons of gatekeeping that would even blush most *BSD users, code stealing, non-acreditation... basically the opposite of the public FOSS/Nix/Lisp world. They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems. Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too. In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX. A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.

dkkergoog 2y ago

[dead]

Gormo 2y ago

Or just put a fence around the bazaar.

arp242 2y ago

Eh, it was never any different. Have you seen the mailing lists of the 90s? There were lots of very bitter, vitriolic, long-running feuds going on.

nullc 2y ago
I was there, I'm personally convinced it's much worse now. Perhaps I'm suffering from rose colored glasses, wouldn't be the first time. My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion. Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
- arp242 2y ago
  It's just because there are more people online compared to the 90s. If 1% of people are extremely excessively unpleasant, then with 100 people that's one person. With 1,000 people then that's 10 people, with 10,000 people that's 100 people, etc. There's maybe 10 million developers involved today? So that's 100,000 people. It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
  - nullc 2y ago
    I agree that scale is the bigger factor, but the infrastructure matters too: Consider invite only vs writable-by-everyone default. Open source development moved from a lot more invite based in the mid 90s to a strong writable-by-everyone social media model particularly with the adoption of Github vs svn/cvs. But the scale issue is an argument that open source should have been going in the opposite direction. More unpleasant actors means more justification for reducing participation.