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Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comm

Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?

Flavius 12y ago
His blog comments were probably just like Twitter conversations: impossible to follow and appearing in an inconsistent order. Thus they had to go away. Also the jokes. Stop broadcasting jokes!
tux3 12y ago
>He claims to want to encourage conversations He certainly does not want to encourage conversation. >Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments. It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ? I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  > It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Good to know, thanks.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    Oh my god, everything about the discussion of this article is nuts. What are you talking about?!
    - codyb 12y ago
      I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s. Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you. [0] - http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - mintplant 12y ago
        The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.
      - SamReidHughes 12y ago
        If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people: > I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button? Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises. Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him. (This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics). Why should he care if others use Twitter ? If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.
  - jshevek 12y ago
    >> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves "Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn? It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.
    - saraid216 12y ago
      > The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn? Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
      - noamyoungerm 12y ago
        A space where you have no reasonable expectation of any form of personal injury, perhaps excluding self-inflicted harm caused by negligence (e.g. cutting off your own hand in the kitchen, but not somebody else cutting off your hand in the kitchen).
        jshevek 12y ago
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Perhaps the fact that he wants such a thing is a joke? Or a comment on the person himself? The irony.
Disruptive_Dave 12y ago
And his Twitter feed is nothing but promotional one-way blasts (not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts).
- masklinn 12y ago
  > not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).
morganvachon 12y ago
> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying. He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."
- Kalium 12y ago
  Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with. This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd. Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      There's something very sad about defining a community by who is excluded.
    - morganvachon 12y ago
      I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works. I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.
lnanek2 12y ago
The article is all about how he doesn't want to communicate with people unless they are in his specifically selected group of people he thinks is OK. So allowing blog comments would probably let anyone communicate, which is what he dislikes about Twitter. So I see the blog comments being disabled as more in line with his philosophy, at least.
- LukeB_UK 12y ago
  So Facebook groups/google+ communities?
serve_yay 12y ago
It says send him an email. Maybe you think he's imposing undue restrictions on the conversation, but I don't think it's fair to say someone doesn't want a conversation because they would prefer to have it in one medium over the other. Plus comments need to be moderated, etc. Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?
jshevek 12y ago
I had similar thoughts. Thank you for transforming my confusion and annoyance to laughter.
vacri 12y ago
The author probably created the header when he was a twitter user, and hasn't gotten around to reformatting it yet. No great conspiracy.
ben0x539 12y ago
> His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it. The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.
- sigmar 12y ago
  He isn't just criticizing it. He is saying it shouldn't exist. It is hypocritical to use it and exclaim that it shouldn't be used.
  - ben0x539 12y ago
    How so? He wants it to stop existing so he stops being compelled to use it. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
tempodox 12y ago
Looks like classic trolling clickbait to me.

Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?

Flavius 12y ago

His blog comments were probably just like Twitter conversations: impossible to follow and appearing in an inconsistent order. Thus they had to go away. Also the jokes. Stop broadcasting jokes!

tux3 12y ago

>He claims to want to encourage conversations He certainly does not want to encourage conversation. >Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments. It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ? I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
> It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Good to know, thanks.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Oh my god, everything about the discussion of this article is nuts. What are you talking about?!
  - codyb 12y ago
    I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s. Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you. [0] - http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - mintplant 12y ago
      The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.
    - SamReidHughes 12y ago
      If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people: > I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button? Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises. Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him. (This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
forgottenpass 12y ago
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics). Why should he care if others use Twitter ? If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.
- jshevek 12y ago
  >> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves "Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn? It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    > The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn? Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
    - noamyoungerm 12y ago
      A space where you have no reasonable expectation of any form of personal injury, perhaps excluding self-inflicted harm caused by negligence (e.g. cutting off your own hand in the kitchen, but not somebody else cutting off your hand in the kitchen).
      - jshevek 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
72deluxe 12y ago
Perhaps the fact that he wants such a thing is a joke? Or a comment on the person himself? The irony.

Disruptive_Dave 12y ago

And his Twitter feed is nothing but promotional one-way blasts (not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts).

masklinn 12y ago
> not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).

morganvachon 12y ago

> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying. He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."

Kalium 12y ago
Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with. This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd. Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    There's something very sad about defining a community by who is excluded.
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works. I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.

lnanek2 12y ago

The article is all about how he doesn't want to communicate with people unless they are in his specifically selected group of people he thinks is OK. So allowing blog comments would probably let anyone communicate, which is what he dislikes about Twitter. So I see the blog comments being disabled as more in line with his philosophy, at least.

LukeB_UK 12y ago
So Facebook groups/google+ communities?

serve_yay 12y ago

It says send him an email. Maybe you think he's imposing undue restrictions on the conversation, but I don't think it's fair to say someone doesn't want a conversation because they would prefer to have it in one medium over the other. Plus comments need to be moderated, etc. Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?

jshevek 12y ago

I had similar thoughts. Thank you for transforming my confusion and annoyance to laughter.

vacri 12y ago

The author probably created the header when he was a twitter user, and hasn't gotten around to reformatting it yet. No great conspiracy.

ben0x539 12y ago

> His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it. The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.

sigmar 12y ago
He isn't just criticizing it. He is saying it shouldn't exist. It is hypocritical to use it and exclaim that it shouldn't be used.
- ben0x539 12y ago
  How so? He wants it to stop existing so he stops being compelled to use it. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

tempodox 12y ago

Looks like classic trolling clickbait to me.