On: Signal community: Reminder: Please be nice

[MrBuddyCasino]

People will exploit and abuse you, knowingly or unknowingly. The amount of idiots and assholes will never go to zero. Never. The good news is that there are usually mechanisms to stop them.

1) If people aren't being respectful, block them.

2) If they put little effort into bug reports/feature requests and are not respectful of your free time - close the issue, link to a generic explanation why.

3) If you are not being compensated and the project burns you out: stop doing it.

There is usually nobody else who can or will do these things for you. Grow a spine, have self respect, value your time, learn from the experience.

[Ensorceled → MrBuddyCasino]

Ah yes, the classic "if you are being abused it's your own fault". Even have the "grow a spine" trope in there.

[nhumrich → Ensorceled]

Its not so much, "it's your own fault" as it is,"You can still take control of the situation"

[MrBuddyCasino → nhumrich]

Yes, there is some Buddhist-flavoured insight in there.

1) you cannot control the world around you

2) you can only control how you react to the world around you

3) to tie your happiness to things you cannot control is to suffer

Once you internalize this, you will identify attempts to circumvent this truth, and why they are ultimately self-defeating.

[Majestic121 → MrBuddyCasino]

Pretty interesting that you map this mentality to Buddhism, when I knew it from Stoicism.

I wonder if they ever influenced each other, or if those principles where 'discovered' independently ?

[MrBuddyCasino → Majestic121]

To me it certainly seems like they share some core insights. The main difference is meditation, which is really the core of Buddhism.

[chillacy → MrBuddyCasino]

> 1) you cannot control the world around you

It's definitely not either/or, sometimes you can change the world a little bit by making a post that says "please be nice".

Or the way I see it: be prepared to step in shit sometimes but if street defecation is not culturally accepted, your walks will be nicer.

[drng → Ensorceled]

It may be poorly put, but I think there's some truth to it: your most effective strategies for dealing with this kind of abuse are those that involve changes to your own behaviors. Trying to solve the problem The Right Way (i.e. at the source) is high effort and low (or no) reward. I don't think advising the pragmatic approach here suggests that abuse is the fault of the abused.

[Ensorceled → drng]

There are three groups; the toxic, their targets, and the group saying "grow a spine" every time the targets try to make progress against the toxic.

[bzb6 → Ensorceled]

Yes, if someone abuses you and you don’t get rid of them then it’s your fault. Unless you have a magic wand that can change the behaviour of others.

[kemitchell → MrBuddyCasino]

> Grow a spine, have self respect, value your time, learn from the experience.

Having read the linked post, I sincerely doubt Adam Piggott lacks a spine, self-respect, a proper sense of his time's worth, or an inability to learn from experience.

[r00fus → MrBuddyCasino]

This advice does not scale. At scale, exploitation and abuse require structural mechanisms and a culture/mindset to combat it.

[MrBuddyCasino → r00fus]

This is true, thats why I wrote "there are usually mechanisms to stop them". From a certain scale, you need to have the tools.