Comment by qwerty456127

> I used to do tech support and some people (not too many) wrote right out rude or nonsensical (like concluding I hate their religion just from the fact our service failed to suit their specific needs).

This isn't at all the same thing. You were paid to do your job, and at the end of the day you could just joke about those weirdos.

When working on an open-source project, everything becomes much more personal because your motivation is fuelled by your own personal attachement to the project. Imagine you're helping elderly people cross the street every day, and every once in a while they yell at you for not doing it better, whatever that means. At some point is it still worth it?

And of course you can't just put that behind you once you're back home, because this abuse happens at home. I remember this time where someone literally told me to kill myself while I was fixing a bug - at midnight - in a project I handle. Or the time I woke up only to see that during the night someone public had decided to openly send me literal fuck emojis on Twitter to right a perceived wrong. Good times.

So yeah - building a shell is the right solution, but it's hard and we really shouldn't have to deal with that in the first place.

For some reason lots of people on HN push stoicism as a virtue. Not all of us are 100% unaffected by dealing with jerks, and we like to get ourselves out of toxic environments that make us unhappy. Is that so bad?

You obviously have never participated in open source and are talking about something you had ZERO experience with. Go participate in a toxic open source community for a couple of months and report back about not only the experience but also you emotional well being. I can guarantee you'll be reading your comment and cringing at what you once wrote.

btw, there is and awesome life lesson in this comment i posted, if you can remove the emotional part of it ;)

> People have to shit - that's physiologically inevitable

I don't think that's universally true. In fact, I think there's a handful of people who don't know how to treat others like human beings and a lack of accountability for their behavior online.

The fact that there is a thing true of open source---it's a harbor for toxic cultures where people aren't held accountable for talking to each other like garbage---doesn't mean we need to just accept that or look the other way. As this situation demonstrates, toxic culture has costs.

Easy to say, not so easy to do.

I agree with you. Really it is something that probably can be learned over time. I think it helps a lot to just remember how much money this or that dumb hater have paid for their entitlements (i.e. nothing), which -at leas in my eyes- emotionally reduces their words to a child's tantrum.

"The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it."

Because it is very very hard to ignore.

I very occasionally get death threats to my work email due to people being unhappy with some public facing stuff I do. It's unsettling but I can mostly ignore it. But if it happened all the time and I wasn't able to open my email or interact with a community without getting hate mail I'd go into a cocoon. People aren't machines. When hatred is relentless it is unbelievably difficult to put it aside.

Should they ignore the negative parts or should people who comment be mindful of the fact that a lot of open source they use is created in someone’s spare time and that they have a human being, not a company? I’d think the latter.