
Choosing to stay out of the community - pulisse
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/
======
CannisterFlux
I realised as I read this post that I have done exactly this on a few
occasions. Taken upstream code, forked it, fixed bugs and used it for myself.
Usually there's no conspiracy, I just cannot be bothered dealing with "you're
doing it wrong" comments when my fix isn't deemed worthy.

The problem I have seen is that certain usually vocal members of a community
can have this double-edged helpful-jerk attitude. Most of the time I just lurk
on communities, so the jerkiness is rarely if ever even directed at me, but it
changes my view of the project to the point where I just don't want to be
involved.

The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question
that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and
with a I-know-better-than-you attitude. If the community person dislikes the
question asked, or the use that people make of their software, why do they
take the time to write answers at all? Usually being pleasant is a question of
writing less words as well. These people go out of their way to add snark to
the response.

This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem.
I've seen the exact same thing on guitar forums. Members that post helpful
replies, but spread a layer of snark over them. You follow their profile and
they often have websites with lots of good free information, lessons and
whatnot, but here they are, writing twatish answers. It has been a problem on
stackoverflow.com too, and they really stirred things up over there recently
trying to herd people into being a bit nicer.

~~~
fefe23
I see this pattern regularly and I always wonder: why would you deny yourself
the opportunity to improve?

If you have a patch, and others know how to make it better, why would you
forgo that chance to learn something?

What good can possibly come out of "I'll just hide in my shed" and tell nobody
about my patch (that is what the OP recommended, invite-only repositories).

You submitting patches has nothing to do with the community. You submitting
patches has everything to do with:

    
    
      a) improving the patch to maximize its usefulness
      b) the project becoming better
      c) you becoming better
      d) the project taking over maintenance of your patch so you don't have to.
    

It's a win-win for everybody.

~~~
fhayde
Honestly, aside from issues with the process it's also just embarrassing. IMO,
that's what is causing a lot of the issues that are being surfaced these days
in oss. No one likes to be told they're ignorant. Add in a smarmy attitude and
poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will
contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.

We've come a long way from the RTFM days but learning something as complicated
as programming tends to make people sensitive about what they do and don't
know.

It's a delicate balance. On one hand the project and the community benefits
from a lot of ideas. On the other hand, a strong ego with poor understanding
can not only destroy a project, they can cost a lot of people a lot of time,
money, and heartache so some sort of barrier to entry that turns some people
away isn't a bad thing.

At the end of the day, it'll all work itself out as long as we keep the
projects open and free. Popular projects attract talent which in turn improve
those projects.

~~~
sgift
> Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident
> or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.

It is a bad thing, because the "most confident" and the "most skilled" are
almost never the same.

~~~
jessaustin
Theoretically, rude gatekeeping can destroy confidence, but it can't really
destroy skill. Of course, the rude gatekeepers typically don't recognize skill
either...

------
peterwwillis
I've been involved with open source communities off and on for over a decade,
as well as other, non-computer communities. News flash: It's not the community
that becomes toxic, it's humanity.

Every community that I've ever witnessed gets toxic at some point. As in-
groups grow more insular and people become more involved, they get more toxic.
But the solution to this phenomenon doesn't have to be black & white. I have
always stayed on the margins of communities, and still dip my toes in the
water occasionally to get something done. But do I need to keep private forks
of patches to avoid messy interactions? Nope.

It's pretty easy to fire off a pull request or patch set and then forget about
it. I'm not investing great deals of effort or emotion. I'm just sharing my
crap. If they merge it, fine, if they don't, fine. But I'm certainly not
keeping super secret private repos for just the cool kids to use. That would
be even _more_ involved than what little I am already.

~~~
fourthark
Not a serious problem with "fire and forget", but an annoyance: say the patch
is not up to standards: not well designed, needs tests, or whatever. It worked
for the contributor but it can't be merged in its current form.

Now the maintainer has to explain what's wrong to a contributor who isn't
going to do anything about it. And then explain again and again to everyone
else who wants that feature that no, it needs work and can't be merged yet.

(Yes, I am that maintainer with dozens of open PRs on his repo, none so bad
they must be closed, but also not good enough to merge.)

~~~
tremon
Then again, why should you wait for the original submitter for those
modifications? The original contributor published his code, and has not given
any indication he's interested in the rest of the process. Why can't anyone
else who wants that feature pick up the slack? Maybe you can make that
explicit, marking such feature requests as NEEDS_WORK or something?

~~~
koliber
This is where the behavior of the maintainer is key.

On one hand, if the maintainer asks the contributor to fix up their code, the
maintainer can be seen us ungrateful, demanding, dictatorial, and/or pedantic.

On the other hand, if the maintainer makes the changes herself, they can seem
impatient, uncooperative, overpowering, and/or power-hungry.

Regardless where on the above spectrum the maintainers behavior falls, they
can come across as friendly, neutral, pessimistic, or toxic. That depends on
how they communicate. It also depends on the social norms that the maintainer
and contributor are used to.

A maintainer must be extremely vigilant and aware of the tone they use and the
image they want to portray. The contributor should also be aware of these
things. If either side wavers, opportunities for an unhealthy brew arise.

This is compounded by the fact that most people, maintainers and contributors,
are doing the work on a volunteer basis. Often there is an unspoken
expectations that others should be grateful for the work that they are doing.
When these expectations are not met, sour feelings arise.

~~~
fourthark
Yes.

Given how difficult this is, it's no surprise to me that potential
contributors might not want to stick their neck out, as expressed in TFA.

------
azernik
For people criticizing this approach as a selfish one:

Fixing toxic communities is _work_. While it would be a public service for the
author to do so, she is under no obligation and probably has a day job and a
life that take priority.

I praise community-builders and community-shapers and code-sharers and code-
reviewers to the heavens, but I'm not going to knock someone who just can't be
bothered to do all of that.

~~~
darawk
You don't need to fix a toxic community to just submit your patch. Just submit
it, and if they don't want it, they don't want it. But at least you've done
the bare minimum of giving back. If they want to tell you to fix your code
formatting or something, or make your comments less phallocentric or whatever
and you don't like it, don't make the changes - but you still ought to submit
the patch.

~~~
freetime2
On the other hand, reviewing code is also work. One could argue that if you
don't intend you follow the contribution guidelines and work with the
maintainers to get the code to a state where it's good enough to merge, you
are wasting their time.

~~~
pm215
I agree, but I also think it's easy to avoid that. If you say in your cover
letter "I appreciate that this might not be in a good state to merge, but I
don't personally have any more time to spend on it and won't be able to
respond to any code review; I'm posting it to make it public in case it helps
somebody else", then the project knows where it stands with the patch, and can
invest time, or not accordingly.

(I did something like that with a half-done binutils patch once. It wasn't
committed, and I didn't expect it to be. But I was happier having put it out
there, so somebody looking for weirdo-TI-COFF-format support maybe had a place
to start.)

~~~
sjm-yc-acct
You're right--communicating about the intent of a patch is a good idea,
especially if that intent is outside of normal expectations.

In a similar vein, I recently learned about prefixing a pull request on
Github/Gitlab with "[WIP]", or a "work in progress", to suggest that the
proposed changes are for informational purposes or not yet complete.

~~~
dsumenkovic
Thanks for mentioning GitLab, Community Advocate here.

WIP is really used, and we even have documentation about it
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/work_...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/work_in_progress_merge_requests.html)

------
blfr
_this is how private warez torrent sites work_

It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a
zombiefied state.

This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many
problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly.

Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-
terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems.
Yes, many can be described as "toxic."

But they're also alive.

And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather
underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins
without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.

~~~
ericdykstra
Lots of private torrent sites are alive and kicking, and lots of open
communities die. I'd need more evidence that openness vs closedness is what
kills them.

~~~
blfr
Their forums are ghost towns. What.cd still doesn't have a successor, and one
of three strong pretenders didn't even manage to stay online.

It may be caused more by competition from Spotifies and Netflixes than their
closedness (although I don't agree) but they're certainly not alive and
kicking.

~~~
askafriend
$10 a month for more content than I know what to do with is such a cheap price
to not have to deal with the pain of torrenting.

If it was $20 per DVD like in the past, the pain of torrenting was far less
than the pain of the cost of buying your favorite movies.

I really think it's that simple. This value equation alone means that a
majority of people won't care enough to go the extra length to participate in
torrent communities. They'll just pay a small $10 a month to watch whatever
they want, whenever they want, on any device, anywhere. That'll kill the
incentive right from the start.

~~~
thecatspaw
> They'll just pay a small $10 a month to watch whatever they want, whenever
> they want, on any device, anywhere.

Unfortunately this doesnt exist. I would gladly pay it. Netflix isnt it
either, no matter how much they pretend they have all the content, the movies
which I am interested in, I have to torrent, because they simply arent on
netflix. Their library is so bad that my first instinct is "oh lets look for a
torrent" instead of "lets check netflix if it has it" when I want to watch a
movie.

------
jasonmunro
I have been running Open Source projects for about 15 years, which implies
moderating the communities around those projects (in my case, very small
communities). I'm familiar with toxic environments. I once sent a very stupid
question to the qmail mailing list - it did not go well for me. But I learned
a lesson from that beat-down.

I make serious efforts to create an inclusive environment for my projects
because that is what Open Source software is all about IMO. Any contribution
deserves respect, it's a gift to the project. Maybe the PR needs some work,
maybe it's total crap - but it's a gift either way and that should be
respected.

It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos just
to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic
environments - but I understand that is a reality. I would like to counter
that with the fact that not all projects are run that way, and some are very
willing to accept contributions.

~~~
pdimitar
> _It makes me sad to think people feel the need to maintain private repos
> just to avoid potential conflict with project maintainers because of toxic
> environments - but I understand that is a reality._

So you get sad for me because I am tired, burned out and want to get stuff
done without the inevitable drama so many people feel they have to inject in
everything?

Thank you for being sympathetic. ;)

This was half-sarcastic / half-serious.

\---

On a totally serious note, you cannot at all blame anyone for wanting less --
or zero -- emotional baggage added to what should be a professional exchange
of code and conversation points. I seriously cannot and will not care if
somebody has a shitty life and spouts poison at me because I try to be helpful
and they have nobody else to vent at the moment. I refuse to participate in a
free therapy / rage unloading session with them.

As we get wiser, we start to get economical with our energy expenditures. Even
more conservatively so with emotional expenditures. That one can feel like
total crap after even one hour of drama is a harsh reality -- and the fact
that many of us choose to avoid ruining our day is absolutely our right.

Nothing for you to feel sad about.

------
AlexB138
While I don't think her solution is the best, I can't say I disagree with the
spirit of this post. With politics being dragged ever more into the software
world, people attacking everyone for any perceived transgression, attempts to
get people kicked out of communities, or even fired, over social media
comments, you really need to consider what you're exposing yourself to by
getting involved in the open source community. You would think that a
community based on giving away typically very expensive effort would be more
welcoming, but somehow we've ended up with this.

It does seem like this is just part of some wider trend though. It's not just
the software world, public communities in general seem to be destabilizing and
radicalizing.

~~~
cannonedhamster
It's not perception. It's a byproduct of a few different things. Close
interaction between people of different social classes, lack of faith in
governmental institutions, massive changes in labor markets, and in the U.S.
in particular massive disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and archaic
voting and representation laws.

------
petercooper
_The private /secret repos I'm talking about? They're probably operating under
Fight Club rules. If you aren't plugged in, they don't even exist as far as
you are concerned. You don't even know you're missing out._

I don't think this is staying out of the community. It's staying out of _a_
community by forming _another_ community, complete with its own set of
good/bad people, rules, and expectations. Indeed, this is how many popular
communities began - small, insular, quiet, before growing larger as human
constructions frequently do.

~~~
slivym
Absolutely, and additionally to this, it's not forming a well-behaved
community, it's forming a community that behaves in the way this particular
person likes. It's just as likely to be full of snark and bitching.

~~~
pdimitar
This is likely, you say... according to whom?

The author clearly expressed their lack of desire to deal with drama or
toxicity. What makes you think they will tolerate it in another community?

------
tathougies
This is ridiculous. I have projects where I don't want feedback, and I have no
intention of fixing bugs.

I put them on GitHub and turn off the issue tracker and PR notifications. If
others want to fork, fine. If others want to discuss on PRs, fine. I don't
care. I'm not fixing it. I avoid the toxicity by not partaking, not hurting my
own career.

~~~
hollerith
Rachel (the OP) probably cannot help but have emotional reactions to people's
behavior even when the people are strangers and the behavior is entirely
online. A large fraction of people are probably like that.

~~~
tathougies
I would suggest therapy or religion to those people.

~~~
hollerith
I hope no one reading my comment (GP) got the impression that I think there is
something pathological about Rachel's choice not to publish her code.

------
DoreenMichele
_Everything you 've already heard about on HN and/or your favorite this-
leaning or that-leaning web site.

This is a legitimate question, and I have an answer, but I don't think many
people are going to like it.

My response to this is to say "wow, look at how screwed up these communities
are", and then tag on "just like I always suspected", and then finally I add
"and that reinforces my decision to stay out of them"._

Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here."

Yeah, that was funny to think about. I've only seen so many articles. Her
write-ups were mostly technical dodging politics a lot. The back and forth,
downvote mobs, or whatever kick in with politics on certain topics or views
due to community's biases. If she stays away from that, then she can still be
really popular.

Whereas, she just now admitted something that could be in the red zone for
some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS.
It's simultaneously a response that's understandable or folks might sympathize
with for the portion that is concerned about toxic behavior in general FOSS
and/or toward minority members in particular. _Still_ a grey area in potential
reaction here.

I find it fascinating to watch how these things play out. Regardless, her
posts about spotting problems, solving them, and keeping them from recurring
were pretty awesome. Most of us will probably still respect her regardless of
how much she's embracing or dodging online communities.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I don't care one iota if she does or does not participate on HN or in any
other community.

The only other post of hers I recall reading boiled down to her refusing to
fix a thing at work that it was her responsibility to fix and wouldn't have
taken very long, like a few minutes, and leaving it that way for six months,
calling it "an experiment" to see if anyone else would fix it and then talking
trash about everyone else at work when her boss finally told her to fix it
already. It struck me as very unprofessional, childish and toxic.

She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming. I'm not a
programmer, so that might just be my ignorance showing. But my guess is that's
the primary reason her writing shows up here so often, because it doesn't
strike me as great writing overall and her attitude seems to be pretty toxic
generally while she blames that on everyone else.

She could make a lot of the same points she makes without pissing all over
everyone in the process. She could very reasonably say "I'm a woman in tech,
so I deal with brogrammers 40+ hours a week and I have no patience left to do
more of that in my off hours." She could say "Eh, different strokes for
different folks. I share my stuff with people I enjoy talking with and I'm
okay with that meaning it isn't out there in the ether for the whole world to
access. We can't all be Linux."

She could make all the same choices she is currently making and describe them
in her blog without gratuitously pissing all over a community that very likely
accounts for a large share, perhaps even the vast majority, of her blog
traffic.

~~~
sulam
> She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming

While I cannot speak to your awareness, I can say for a fact that there are
many women who blog about programming.

[https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=women+w...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=women+who+blog+about+programming&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

Maybe programming blogs aren't that interesting to you so you don't have much
exposure to them? I'm struggling to understand how you would not be aware that
there are more such blogs beyond Rachel's.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm not a programmer. I already said that.

If there are many more women who actually blog about programming per se,
rather than blogging about the problem of being a woman in tech, then I am
even more mystified as to why her writing seems to be so popular here.

~~~
sincerely
On a technical level her skills/knowledge are world-class and her most
successful posts[1] have been tech-focused.

[1]:[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story&query=rachelbythebay.com)

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you.

------
diddid
I read this as being similar to “The king is dead long live the king.”
Toxicity is just swapped with different toxicity. The road to toxic is often
paved with good intentions.

------
xenadu02
IMHO Some of the responses here are missing the point. That seems to be a
common theme as of late: "I don't like the argument or I'm already on side 'X'
in this fight, so I'm going to setup a straw-man to attack so I can avoid
engaging the core premise of the article."

Her post isn't about keeping a private repo or being selfish. It's about "I am
not your therapist or punching bag, nor is it my job to educate you, so why
would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community?
What am I supposed to gain from that interaction, other than being insulted,
belittled, _and_ having my patches ignored?"

She is hardly the only person who stays far away from contributing to the
Linux kernel (and other projects) thanks to certain nasty and emotional
segments of "community". Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows
they exist. The project just has a reputation for being full of assholes, so
many really talented people choose to stay away (or strictly limit their
involvement). This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can
be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical
merit. Assholes (by virtue of being assholes) usually immediately dismiss this
by claiming anyone making such complaints is technically inferior (or is
intrinsically unsuited to contributing because of their age, gender, or other
attribute).

I'll also point out that acting out like this is purely emotional knee-jerk
behavior - the exact _opposite_ of merit or technical arguments. Linus is
perfectly capable of criticizing patches on technical merits without calling
people morons in the process. In the past he has chosen to lash out
emotionally for one reason or another. Perhaps he had a bad day. Perhaps he
just enjoyed insulting other people. Perhaps he thought he was better than
them and wanted to show off how superior he was. None of us can really know
the underlying reason, but at the end of the day it hardly matters.

I really want to stress my last point: lots of people (including here on HN)
are trying to make a self-evidently Orwellian case that adopting a CoC and
setting community standards is somehow trading technical merit for soothing
people's feelings... in defense of another contributor's ability to lash out
emotionally. One has to engage in some especially motivated reasoning to make
such prima-facia false claims.

A code-of-conduct basically boils down to "don't attack people personally and
don't belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors". Or perhaps in
simpler terms: "act like a professional".

Being professional means giving direct and honest feedback. Lying to avoid
hurt feelings is the opposite of professional!

~~~
jancsika
That's all well and good. But none of it explains why the author says the
current changes taking place in the Linux project _reinforce_ her decision not
to participate in Linux.

How does a code of conduct and a hiatus for the guy who was cursing at people
reinforce the decision to stay away? The only way that makes sense is if she
weren't previously aware of any of the documented cases of Linus' abusive
behavior, and that seems quite unlikely given she was already using her own
"shadow ecosystem" years ago.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_But none of it explains why the author says the current changes taking place
in the Linux project reinforce her decision not to participate in Linux._

I can't speak for the author, so I can't explain that to you.

What I can tell you is that _virtue signaling_ is vastly more common than
people actually doing the right thing and nasty behavior frequently gets a
great deal worse during periods when people are very visibly and openly trying
to publicly address the problem in some manner.

My observation is that a common outcome is the metaphorical guillotines come
out, people on their high horses behead all the bad guys, pronounce themselves
to now be the good guys in charge and then business as usual follows.

So, for example, if the issue is sexism, terrible evil asshole sexist pigs
take the fall to be promptly replaced by more men, not a mixed gender group of
leaders, and you hear a lot of smack talk about more women being in the
pipeline and _someday_ this will result in gender parity while nothing really
changes. But you should be nice to the new men in charge since they beheaded
the bad guys and, clearly, in twenty years this will pay off for women.

If the issue is racism, well, clearly, racist white supremacist assholes get
removed and are promptly replaced by new white people who will obviously treat
people of color better -- someday, but probably not today, but you should
believe they are the good guys. After all, they were so kind as to behead your
enemies.

Etc.

If you are part of an "oppressed" group, you eventually get burned out on
watching all the white guys fight over which white guys are less evil while no
one actually does much of anything to genuinely include women, people of
color, etc. And you don't really care to get in the middle of this mess
knowing that none of these people actually has your best interest at heart and
every last one of them will be happy to trample you underfoot in service of
convincing virtue signaling.

Some of the most vicious fights are the ones about how to be respectful and
well-mannered. Those frequently get ugly real, real fast and only go down hill
from there.

~~~
pdimitar
> _What I can tell you is that virtue signaling is vastly more common than
> people actually doing the right thing_

You absolutely nailed it right here IMO.

Codes of conduct nowadays I feel are hijacked and reshaped into the vendetta
persecutions you described.

Could Linus be nicer? Everybody keeps talking about that. I almost never see
anyone assume that he tried being nicer but the only way he could get through
to people was to draw their attention with being rude.

~~~
DoreenMichele
From what I gather, Linus is sincere and making a good faith effort. I think
that's a better signal than writing a Code of Conduct. CoCs strike me as
virtue signaling more often than not.

Hopefully, Linus will figure out a better path forward and start setting a
better example. If he does that, I think that will make more of a difference
than a CoC.

------
cryptonector
I help keep at least one fork due to the upstream community being toxic. It's
expensive, but what can you do?

A small and healthy community doesn't even need a code of conduct, but in the
long run any _large_ community needs by-laws and governance, and that includes
rules for punishing toxic participants.

------
michaelmrose
It seems amazing to me that people use toxic to mean "A tiny minority of
anonymous people on a world accessable network of people may say mean things"

The world is full of at least 10% of people that are just stupid and awful. We
should work to keep taking out the trash but we shouldn't turn away from the
entire community.

If you choose not to share your own work because someone might say mean things
I'm disappointed but if you keep private forks of public open source software
I feel like your cheating the system that benefits you.

~~~
Pfhreak
Why do you accept that people being mean to you is a price you must be willing
to pay to participate? (Aside, toxic can be much much worse that just "being
mean", but I'll engage with your definition here for the sake of discussion.)

~~~
michaelmrose
I mean that some portion of the population is between disagreeable and
despicable. Good communities ban the despicable but no matter where you draw
the line some people will inevitably be negative enough to be a drag without
stepping over the line to the point of being banned.

------
itronitron
at least some of the toxicity in a community around an open source project is
due to the pressure the participants feel in maintaining both their own
professional reputation and the viability of the project, and there are
positive ways to engage with the core committers that will create goodwill all
around.

I hope people consider the potential of playing the long game when engaging
with a community. Yes there are assholes in the world but they frequently move
on to other pursuits, or just die, and after they are gone it's just amazing
how excited people are to get things done.

~~~
pdimitar
And what if I value my time enough so as not to want to waste a minute of my
life and wait "to play the long game"?

^ I believe that's the premise of the article.

------
mcherm
Well that sucks.

I mean she is WELCOME to keep her contributions to private repos shared only
among trusted friends if that's how she wants to work. But it's not for me. I
want the work that I do to be shared as widely as possible. (I would share
more widely if my employer permitted it.) That is why I choose permissive
licenses, and make an effort to contribute patches back to the original
source.

Yes, sometimes the communities are toxic. When I see that I speak up. Yes,
sometimes my code contributions are used by people I don't much like or used
for purposes I don't support. But far MORE often they are used by people I
don't know, who I would certainly find to be perfectly nice folks if I ever
DID meet them, but individual connections don't scale.

So Rachel is welcome to her insular community -- but I'm going to stick to the
open one. I'd rather fix the flaws it has than hope to get a better one by
foregoing the openness.

~~~
compiler-guy
How long did it take Linus to realize his behavior was toxic? How many times
was he told?

That's a lot of work to fix a project for almost no benefit to yourself.

Life is too short to deal with [people who aren't nice].

------
hardwaresofton
> I'm here to remind everyone of that post, and to point out that I'm not the
> only one doing this. There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-
> only source repos being shared among friends who are responsible for those
> they invite, including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out
> to be troublesome.

This has crossed my mind before, I think it might be the only way to actually
meaningfully stop rapid expansion/dilution of culture, which I think is
roughly equivalent to what people mean when they say things get "toxic" or the
community worsens (it's a bit of a stretch but you can rephrase toxic behavior
as behavior that is not regarded as productive/acceptable by the original or
some other culture).

Does anyone have any examples like this? An invite-only network that penalizes
bad actors by revoking their membership along with everyone else they've
invited?

------
RustyRussell
This is why I always try to accept people's first contributions, even if it
means reworking them to fit (I usually just do it if it's trivial, or give
guidance and offer to do it if not).

I have generally had really great responses when I've sent drive-by tweaks to
other FOSS projects, so I feel obliged to pay that forward to others.

------
freetime2
Usage of the word "toxic" is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. I see it
used all over the place recently to describe groups of people who, while they
may exhibit some unfortunate traits, will not actually cause you to get sick
or die. More often than not calling people toxic feels more like a way to
write off people with whom you disagree or who you simply dislike.

This isn't to say that people in e.g. the open source software community don't
behave badly. They absolutely do behave badly. But rather than just labeling
someone toxic and assuming that everyone agrees and shares your definition of
"toxic" \- I feel that everyone's interests would be better served by actually
describing 1) what exactly the problematic behavior is, 2) why it is bad, and
3) how to behave better.

TL;DR I find usage of the word "toxic" to be toxic. :)

~~~
pdimitar
Or maybe you simply disagree with the author of the article and are seeking a
way to undermine her opinion and overwrite it with... your opinion? :)

That's how your comment came across to me.

~~~
freetime2
I did not offer any opinion other than I don't like using the word toxic to
describe people. But since you bring it up, my opinion on the article is that
the author is in no way obligated to contribute code to open source
communities that she doesn't like dealing with. In other words, I agree with
her. I'll even go a step further and say that I support codes of conduct for
online communities if they encourage civil discourse and encourage more people
to participate.

As for my motivations - my comment was actually more inspired by the comments
here than the original article (61 occurrences of the word toxic at the time I
write this). Are you now going to suggest that my intent is to undermine
everyone who used the word toxic here and replace their opinions with my own?
Or are you willing to accept my plea to stop referring to people as toxic at
face value?

~~~
pdimitar
Neither.

I am more curious why do you dislike the word "toxic" being used to describe
people?

~~~
freetime2
Because it is imprecise and dismissive.

~~~
pdimitar
Says you. Let's recognize the undeniable fact that it's just your opinion.
Same as the people using the word toxic saying it's deserved (your opponents)
-- that's an opinion as well. If you are open to discuss your definition then
a talk might happen. If not, everybody is stuck in their own confirmation
bias.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
geekone
I see little value in this post. She simply proclaims how "screwed" up HN,
Linux, and other communities are, then uses an irrelevant story / anecdote to
explain her lack of public participation in open source software. This could
have been wrapped up in a tweet along the lines of: "These communities are
toxic and screwed up, as I suspected! This reinforces my decision to stay
out."

~~~
pdimitar
And what value does your comment have? You basically rephrase her article.

------
village-idiot
When shit started hitting the fan with the Linux CoC, my boss indicated that
it was a shame that the CoC was being used as a tool for political revenge.

My response was to wonder why there were so many grudges? The CoC is for
certain acting like gasoline on a fire, but I don’t believe it was the spark.

Glad I never really bothered to try interacting with that community in the
first place.

------
jancsika
> There could be an entire "shadow ecosystem" of invite-only source repos
> being shared among friends who are responsible for those they invite,
> including possibly having whole "trees" pruned if they turn out to be
> troublesome.

That could certainly be evidence that FLOSS projects need to do a better job
of mentoring newcomers, and of combating abusive and anti-social behavior on
their lists and issue trackers. That people are squirreled away on "shadow
ecosystems" in sizable numbers would be a sign that FLOSS projects are failing
at those tasks.

But it is not evidence that the artifacts these shadow ecosystems are
producing have much value. If there are indeed a sizable number of
participants there would be an example of a fork that releases
binaries/tarballs of significantly higher quality than the original project.

Does anyone have such an example?

* tarball/binary available for fork

* fork is significantly improved over the original project

* FLOSS dev community for fork is invite only

~~~
stonogo
I could name some arguable candidates: XFree86/x.org, mplayer/mplayer2/mpv,
and xchat/HexChat. In many cases the catalyst was some kind of licensing
disagreement, but the reason people were drawn to the fork was the dev culture
of the original project. What they have in common is the original project
tends to (but does not always) wither and die, at which point the quiet fork
becomes the main focus.

But to be clear, this is the normal, daily-basis operation in the name of
distro packaging, too. Some distros (Slackware, e.g.) try to hew as close to
upstream as possible, but others (Red Hat and Debian, e.g.) significantly
modify the upstream code, and development of this private not-a-fork-just-a-
set-of-massive-patches is absolutely invite-only. There are weird rituals
around not calling a given distro's effective forking "a fork," but in essence
that's exactly what it is. "We can't get this patch accepted upstream,"
they'll say, and then the fork is live. It leads to heated and sometimes
inimical clashes between the upstream dev and the packaging entity (c.f.
xscreensaver, firefox/iceweasel, etc).

The only difference between some of these "packaging efforts" and the
article's "shadow ecosystem" is how many users they have, really.

~~~
jancsika
> I could name some arguable candidates: XFree86/x.org, mplayer/mplayer2/mpv,
> and xchat/HexChat.

Sorry, I left out the bullet about development being done in a private,
invite-only group. That's what I'm curious about, and I don't think there are
any examples of that.

------
mcguire
The linked article from 2013 is worth a read, too:
[http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/)

------
John_KZ
If your ego is so fragile, than good, keep the code to yourself. Some people
might be a bit too sharp, but when you get the 100th "bug fix" that includes
unsafe code, extra dependencies and the effort put into auditing is 10x the
effort to write it on your own, then yes, you'll get a rude response. You
might have been meaning well, but others haven't. Your contribution won't be
missed.

~~~
zaphar
You are making an unvalidated assumption about her code quality based off of
her desire to not participate. This sort unsubstantiated opinion, stated with
an implied assumption of fact, is exactly the sort off thing that contributes
to toxicity in a community.

------
nailer
> What's funny is that my friends in the know tell me this is how private
> warez torrent sites work: you invite someone, and now you're responsible for
> their behavior. If they mess up, you deal with them, or you might be out,
> too.

lobste.rs works like this too. Tree structures of invites are a great way to
prune further up the tree when undesired behavior happens.

~~~
Harkins
I believe only once has someone who invited a problem user been banned. That
inviter contributed a feature to disable invitations and was unbanned. But I
think the possibility also has a deterring effect that prompts people to
exercise care.

(Context: I'm the lobsters admin.)

------
diminoten
I just don't understand how you validate and inspect your own ideas without
participating in _some_ broader Internet-based community. Be these technical
ideas or social ideas, "not participating" is akin to "not examining".

The toxicity is just a byproduct, and you try to rise above it, but not
participating sounds to me to be a dulling activity, not a sharpening one.

------
sureaboutthis
> ...the Central Intelligence Agency has used it for hacking, Google for
> crawling webpages, Pixar for producing movies and Spotify for recommending
> songs.

This statement gives articles and journalism like this a bad name. It's as
misleading as you can get as it gives the impression Python would be the main
language for these jobs and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm sure
it participates in some way, directly or indirectly, but doesn't perform the
main function.

And then we get this:

> Fortran, Lisp and Ada were all highly popular in the 1980s and 1990s

Which may be true for Fortran and maybe even Ada in defense or government but
Lisp? I don't think so.

------
Myrmornis
Really silly, mean-spirited post. Open-source software is one of the pinnacles
of human culture, and it's a wonderful fact that our most capitalist economies
depend on it absolutely. There is nothing impressive or honourable or wise or
interesting about the sentiment expressed in the post.

~~~
spiderfarmer
..and evidently, the open source community and its products could be even more
impressive if it was better at responding to criticism. You are bad at this -
and that’s a problem.

~~~
Myrmornis
I'm just stating my opinion; that's essentially what this site is for. I
wasn't criticized and therefore was not responding to criticism. It is true
that I have little time for codes of conduct etc.

~~~
spiderfarmer
"It is true that I have little time for codes of conduct etc"

That's the worst excuse for plastering the internet with low quality
'opinions' like the one above.

~~~
Myrmornis
No, the problem is that you don’t like my opinion, not that it is low quality.
And that’s absolutely fine. I made two serious points in 3 sentences; the
remainder was a criticism of the post. My points were about what a fascinating
and positive phenomenon open source is. If you’d like I can explain them to
you again.

------
carapace
This is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

------
solotronics
It comes across as elitist to keep code fixes in your own private repository
to 'punish' those you don't agree with. The whole point is freedom and sharing
code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers.

What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree
with?

~~~
geofft
> _The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human
> defined barriers._

Whose point is this?

It is not the point of the free software movement as seen by the FSF, which
calls the APSL 1.x non-free because it requires you to publish changes
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-
apsl.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/historical-apsl.html) , nor of the
(largely similar) free software movement as seen by Debian, which has a
"dissident test" that explicitly requires you have the option of keeping
changes among your trusted friends (assuming you trust them not to republish,
of course) [https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-
faq.html](https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html) . It is certainly not
the point of the open-source movement nor the Linux Foundation, both of which
are firmly supportive of companies making internal improvements and not
publishing any of them.

If it is _your_ point, I urge you to reconsider a position that focuses on
individuals not publishing code instead of corporations not publishing code.

