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Ask HN: How can toxic behavior in open source communities be discouraged?
This post is inspired by the Capistrano author's post, in which he expressed a high level of dissatisfaction and burnout. What, as a community, can be done to re-engineer the human side of open source projects to strongly discourage such negative behavior and foster a more constructive, supportive environment?
It seems to be a recurring theme: developer creates something cool, gives it away, and then gets bled dry by the freebie parasites.
- swanson 13y agoSomething I thought about the other day after seeing it on a GitHub project (can't remember the link, sadly) was to put your avatar/picture in the README. Most projects have an author or contact section, but my thought was that putting your picture there helps to remind people that you are a real person. Before you file a "this project sucks" bug or make a negative comment on twitter, hopefully you will remember that human element and skip the toxic behavior.
- ClayFerguson 13y agoIMO it boils down to how to give uses a 'reputation score' in a fair way that lets in new users, but detects 'rude people' so that their negativity can be filtered out. It's the most challenging problem in social media today, I think, because there are so many jerks out there making life miserable for the 'good people'. A workable approach may be using Facebook logins, so that people can't as easily hide behind anonymity, but then again I hate forcing users to be on Facebook just to use some other thing. Perhaps there is a business model here (business to be made), in a company that can validate that this is a 'real' person, eliminate anonymity, and perhaps be able to 'shame people into being nice online'. So that aspect of it of course comes down to how to verify true identity online.
- swanson 13y agoWould be interesting to see some kind of reputation system on GitHub. I could give +1 to users that file good bug reports or submit pull requests. Community could vote down negative reports/comments. Since GitHub is becoming a defacto resume for some developers, this could encourage people to not be assholes if there is the possibility of a demerit showing up on their profile page.
- aaron695 13y ago> developer creates something cool, gives it away, and then gets bled dry by the freebie parasites. What are freebie parasites? Isn't the point of OS is it's free as compared to commercial where people are expect to pay? Are people even sure this is a serious issue? The original post even says he doesn't think that's the reason he's burning out. [edit] OK talk about how libreoffice is trying to deal with issues in general. https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/challenges_libreoffice/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/challenges_li...
- ctb_mg 13y agoI don't understand the OP's original phrase "bled dry by the freebie parasites". So I don't know how people who use code on github would be "parasites", nor how they would bleed anything dry. Primarily open source software (or free software movement, whatever you'd like to call it) is free as in freedom, not necessarily free as in beer.
- bjourne 13y agoIt isn't nearly as bad as you think. I have no numbers to back it up, but most burnouts (my own included) happens because you work to hard and take on much more work and responsibility than you can handle. It is really easy to let free software consume way to much of your life. IME those kind of burnouts outnumber those caused by toxic behavior 1000:1.