Comment by erulabs
4 months ago
When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again.
Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.
This is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that.
But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme.
Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.)
So it suggests another junior, desperate to prove their own standing, and needing to compete against others rather than collaborate. I've seen this kind of response in one adult (abusive to other forum members) but he clearly had quite severe mental health issues (and the user was banned.) In youngsters it is usually extinguished with firm moderator guidance.
With adult responders, frustration and tedium play a role. Personally I'm more generous with replies in the morning than the evening. At times I almost "fake" patience (when I'm getting impatient) with people who are simply not thinking, and who aren't listening.
Overall it is very imbalanced. The asker is asking 1 question. The replier may answer tens or hundreds in a day. So it's hard to answer each one as if it's original, as if it matters, as if you've not heard it a million times before (especially if it's right there in the FAQ.)
Part of answering well, and the quality of any forum, is in participants answering well, even if the question is trivial.
We all were newbies once. Asking stupid questions is how we grew from there. Answering stupid questions is how we pay it forward.
Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...
The world's most successful open source developer didn't converge on that communication style for no reason. I don't think I've seen a single person bring up the classism inherent in dictating gentlemanly manners. Part of what made open source unique is that people from all classes could participate, and working class people are not tuned to pick up on subtle communication the way the upper classes have been. Linus likes to communicate in a way that leaves no ambiguity about he feels, to people of any class background, or any level of English language proficiency. The tradeoff is it offends the sensibilities of highly domesticated elites.
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Sigh, simpler times
TLDR seems to be like "whatever moron made this is mentally disabled". Not quite the KYS that is popular with the youth (in a game played by mostly teenage boys, we kept needing to moderate and escalate ban durations for a lot of players) but not particularly great to put it mildly indeed
You're talking about adults with severe mental health issues - I wouldn't be surprised if those are over-represented in open source contributors.
> Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.
It’s pretty typical of the alpha-nerd type who derives a ton of their self worth from superiority in some arcane area.
I've recently told a person to kill themselves. Because I was very frustrated with the trend their product is going. For example, they rolled out a wysiwyg editor with the "lose all the text input" feature.
I'm writing such harsh words when I expect 0 improvement from the company but I hope at least to make the customer support person reconsider their life choices and quit the evil company
As a data point, would you care to reveal your age?
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This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list.
One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.
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And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself.
(The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".)
That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
> Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them.
Agreed.
> You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself.
Never got that, though. I hung out on comp.lang.lisp back in the day.
I recall once, writing a small utility to read a file in /etc/ and do $SOMETHING based on the settings therein. I asked about the best way to read ini/config files; did not mention /etc.
I got flamed for not storing my configs in s-expr and simply using the builtin reader ... needless to say I was never going to switch all the files in /etc to s-expressions.
A read on Erik Naggum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
COCs never became popular though, business types enforced them and hackers fought against and lost
Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.
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So, I definitely believe this story 100%: when I was on the anglosphere Internet in 200x, there was a lot of elitism and hazing rituals of sorts, among other things. It was a very real and unfortunate thing that coincided the otherwise excellent experiences (IMO) of being online at that time.
Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated.
But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.)
Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation.
But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.)
All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time.
(The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
Because people blindly believe anecdotes without context are representative of anything?
Your daily reminder that a code of conduct is only as valuable as the moderation team behind it.
I'm sorry that happened. That is monstrously bad behavior.
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Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up.
My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project.
Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :)
I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.
Hey thanks! I hold copyright like a stack overflow post owner holds their copyright. In reality, the change was maybe 4 bytes, it got wrapped into a “refactoring” commit and tada no need to reference the OG author. I played the same games back then too, so I ain’t even mad.
I will still reach out because BSD dev was a small community back then and we have probably crossed paths!
FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.
Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this.
IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.
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I noticed something that looked like inconsistent behaviour with the arch installer, and I wanted to learn why it looked like that to me. I asked in the forums a bunch of questions to understand the process better, with the aim to improve the installation guide for everyone else after me.
I was told I should just ignore the error messages I was seeing. When I kept asking, some of the most active members started insulting and ridiculing me. Then others started joining in.
The only thing I had in mind was to improve the guide for other people new to arch, that came after me. Instead, I was only insulted and ridiculed. I uninstalled Arch and never did anything with it again. The toxicity of that community still makes me angry today.
Do I understand correctly that su is to switch user, and that your patch makes it work with the target user's credentials rather than necessarily root?
I was confused while reading because I nearly only ever use su to switch to the superuser account and obviously to get root permissions you should be root or else it's a security issue. Looking up what su does on FreeBSD, I was reminded that it can switch to any user. I've actually used that before. You made that? :o
God that is the absolute worst. Those type of examples make my blood boil. Unfortunately, it happens all too often in life, especially in business.
Just wow
In the early days of the PERL Usenet group, I asked my first question and used the word "newbie" to describe my skill level. I got an automated reply scolding me for using the word "newbie".
A bit of morbid curiosity has me wondering who that was. Back when I contributed some stuff to KDE I pulled a bunch of petulant kid shit (although what you described is not and was never my style). My recollection is that it was a pretty diverse and accepting group of freaks and geeks that would likely get shunned these days as the pendulum swings right… including a certain Tool aficionado that comments on HN occasionally.
Telling someone to kill themselves is wildly inappropriate and shouldn't have happened to you.
Ehh.
When people reminisce about "the old internet" they tend to forget how hostile it was.
Being devils advocate it wasn't common for young people to engage in the activity but harsh and unfair critic was happening often.
It still exists today, but in much smaller scale than back then.
Wow I would never have expected such poor behaviour, that's awful.
Dude, whoever wrote that to you was a piece of shit. Forget about them - almost guaranteed that someone who behaves like that has way bigger problems in their life & doesn't deserve your time or attention. You were a 14 y.o kid who produced something and took the time to release it. That takes dedication and guts. Well done.
Sorry to hear that. Props to you for keep on going!
I hope this person managed to change, or that KDE has managed to get rid of them. I expect KDE to be better than this.
Sigh, good old days
When you could tell teens to kill thmeselves over nothing? That's what you're musing over? Get some help.
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