Lately a number of open source projects has faced tremendous pressure from people coming from Twitter and Reddit to have issues resolved a certain way.
Can you point to a specific example? the only things I have seen is some brigading and cabal to pressure a project owner to remove a contributor from a project, but it was akin to a lynch mob, not related with programming in any way.
If 'meh' had used a real name they probably would have attacked him pretty early in that conversation - going after his job or his reputation in other areas.
The shield of a pseudonym allowed him to stand strong and forced his opponents to engage with him, resulting in this masterful display of defeating an SJW mob. This is a lesson to us all, and a reminder of what is no longer possible with "real name" policies.
Those threads prove to me that it has become very time and effort efficient to mob swarm things on the internet. You can spend five minutes a day making some project's life miserable.
When you see "I got a message on Google plus from one of my fellow dev buddies from the F# community linking this discussion." you pretty much know that the mob doesn't have any real interest in your project other than to spend a couple of minutes to show their outrage. This is basically why people still put a lot more weight on letters, fax, and phone calls.
The recent witch hunt against projects that don't have Code of Conducts.
isn't really true. The issue started with a maintainer who advertised their relationship with @opal on twitter who then made perceived transphobic comments.
I'm at a loss for words. I don't know whether to be angry that there's discrimination or the person playing the victim card and demanding change on a github out of all places. When the hell did github issues tracker turn into an all out debate forum?
I don't know that I would go that far. He was very abrasive, whereas his core message could've been plenty to stop the nonsense he always added a little bit of aggression to keep the drama going.
If he was a genius, you probably wouldn't ever have known the issue existed. At least it seems that way to me.
But the people who started the attacks researched his profiles and publicized the entire thing. Their entire goal was public ridicule and getting him denounced.
If this group of thugs is good at anything, it's getting the word out and the twitter mobs mobilized.
It's really sad that it seems like the developer in question wasn't even speaking from a place of hate. Really unfortunate that the reaction is basically the pressure others to participate in a silent treatment of the individual.
This is one example I had in mind when I made this thread; the issue that the grandparent mentions is another. I have seen a similar scenario play out with a few smaller projects' repositories but I am reluctant to mention them.
There is also good-natured but meaningless noise like https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/5. I believe this kind of support, while flattering at first, ultimately puts undue pressure on the volunteer contributor. On the plus side, the comments come from people using the project.
Perhaps GitHub was wrong to get rid of the upvote button on issues unconditionally. Having the option to enable it would probably have helped the Gogs case.
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Can you point to a specific example? the only things I have seen is some brigading and cabal to pressure a project owner to remove a contributor from a project, but it was akin to a lynch mob, not related with programming in any way.
The recent witch hunt against projects that don't have Code of Conducts.
'meh' did a masterful job with those:
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/942 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/945
If 'meh' had used a real name they probably would have attacked him pretty early in that conversation - going after his job or his reputation in other areas.
The shield of a pseudonym allowed him to stand strong and forced his opponents to engage with him, resulting in this masterful display of defeating an SJW mob. This is a lesson to us all, and a reminder of what is no longer possible with "real name" policies.
Those threads prove to me that it has become very time and effort efficient to mob swarm things on the internet. You can spend five minutes a day making some project's life miserable.
When you see "I got a message on Google plus from one of my fellow dev buddies from the F# community linking this discussion." you pretty much know that the mob doesn't have any real interest in your project other than to spend a couple of minutes to show their outrage. This is basically why people still put a lot more weight on letters, fax, and phone calls.
I didn't follow that mess to closely but:
isn't really true. The issue started with a maintainer who advertised their relationship with @opal on twitter who then made perceived transphobic comments.
My god those comments are a shitshow
I'm at a loss for words. I don't know whether to be angry that there's discrimination or the person playing the victim card and demanding change on a github out of all places. When the hell did github issues tracker turn into an all out debate forum?
Meh is a genius in handling those people, you do have to admit that.
I don't know that I would go that far. He was very abrasive, whereas his core message could've been plenty to stop the nonsense he always added a little bit of aggression to keep the drama going.
If he was a genius, you probably wouldn't ever have known the issue existed. At least it seems that way to me.
But the people who started the attacks researched his profiles and publicized the entire thing. Their entire goal was public ridicule and getting him denounced.
If this group of thugs is good at anything, it's getting the word out and the twitter mobs mobilized.
Bingo.
And this is what makes the way he handled it -genius- :-)
It's really sad that it seems like the developer in question wasn't even speaking from a place of hate. Really unfortunate that the reaction is basically the pressure others to participate in a silent treatment of the individual.
This Google NTP stuff with SystemD comes to mind [1]. Everybody, especially HN, jumped on the hate train and spammed the issue
[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437
This is one example I had in mind when I made this thread; the issue that the grandparent mentions is another. I have seen a similar scenario play out with a few smaller projects' repositories but I am reluctant to mention them.
There is also good-natured but meaningless noise like https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/5. I believe this kind of support, while flattering at first, ultimately puts undue pressure on the volunteer contributor. On the plus side, the comments come from people using the project.
Perhaps GitHub was wrong to get rid of the upvote button on issues unconditionally. Having the option to enable it would probably have helped the Gogs case.