Hyprland Is a Toxic Community

https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html

by Tomte • 3 years ago

108 88 3 years ago

That's.. quite disappointing.. Still, I do have some hope that just maybe, maybe he will understand how the toxicity harms... others, and make changes for the better..

shrimp_emoji2• 3 years ago

What is with these ellipses

tourmalinetaco2• 3 years ago

In order to feel special they have chosen a typing quirk, which is to LARP as being sleepy 24/7.

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

I have a lot of respect for Drew for the technical work he did, but it's difficult to take this seriously. Maybe because we come from very different cultures, I don't know. I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice (which happens to be sway) and can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like. If whatever the developer clique are doing (which are actually pushing the thing forward) works for them — great! I'd be just fine with it as a user.

HexDecOctBin2• 3 years ago

A community is just another name for somewhere you go to for troubleshooting, be it a forum, Stack Exchange or Discord? Unless you have never needed that, and that RTFM has been enough.

kamma44343• 3 years ago

But to ask a question about bitmap rendering do you really need to enter you real name and pronouns of choice? Wouldn’t ‘potato04’ be good enough? I’d go as far as to say that your RL identity is off topic.

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

Sure, if you call that community. Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences. I've never done it and as a result never had problems with anyone¹. If someone actively drags politics of any kind into a purely technical discussion, and then looks surprised when some bigoted idiot blows his nut — well, that looks like a a completely made-up problem from my neck of the woods.

1: let me mention here that I come from an ethnic minority in my country and for reasons completely unrelated to this discussion am not welcome in many corners of the internet.

RamblingCTO3• 3 years ago

You have no right to a response from a community. Sure, it's a pity if you don't get support from a great project. But it's nothing you're guaranteed to receive. And that can even happen with projects that aren't considered toxic.

Bu9818• 3 years ago

I think Discord servers for a software project tend to attract a younger audience and are more noisy/active and have offtopic discussion, compared to something like a user/-dev channel on IRC.

seba_dos12• 3 years ago

You may quickly feel the need for a "community" when you start to contribute, learn about its insides and want to push the project forward. Unless you're happy with publishing to your own fork that nobody knows about, software development is a social activity that often spawns social relationships.

myaccountonhn• 3 years ago

I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice

I think hyperland is big within ricing community, where people try to setup their own computing environment. It's a fun creative outlet, I used to do it a lot in high school. It taught me so much about linux which later on helped me professionally, so it's sad to see that the community isn't more inclusive.

a3_nm2• 3 years ago

can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like

Well, Drew's article gives a concrete example of a victim. But beyond this specific article, it is not difficult to find examples of people who were harassed when trying to be involved in an open source community. This is pretty much the reason why so many open source projects are adopting codes of conduct.

LtWorf• 3 years ago

Automatic scanners that rank libraries take away points if you don't have a code of conduct, and github nags you.

This is why my projects have one.

nebulous1• 3 years ago

I found this link on the reddit thread: https://pastes.io/hbaaff2c8f

dtx1• 3 years ago

It seems Internet Communities of all kind default to a kind of hateful toxicity unless steps are taken in the opposite direction. If the Mods chose to encourage such behavior you get 4chan style levels of degeneracy pretty fast.

friend_and_foe3• 3 years ago

It's pretty easy to prevent that though: ban the N word and the K word, the derogatory word for Jews. That gets you 90% of the way there. You'll put off the types that drop into communities just to shit the place up. The rest of it is just letting people be themselves and the emergent culture that comes along with it. Just ban 2 words, you don't need an endless CoC to prevent the toxicity, those are generally for enforcing much more strict ideological conformity.

kamma44343• 3 years ago

Who said that all communities should be “non toxic” and inclusive? It is definitely idiotic to lose possibly valuable members because of pronouns, but it’s their own community.

goku122• 3 years ago

I was going to just neglect this thinking that Drew may be subjecting this community to his strict standards. But then, there is this:

And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”

This is very a specific and active involvement of a moderator in the act. Such interventions are a gross misuse of moderator privileges in any community.

Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.

That's a low effort attempt at downplaying and justifying an act in bad faith. If you go back long enough, you would find similar roots for the N-word (quoting wikipedia: "It was initially seen as a relatively neutral term"). It became so obnoxious because of the involvement of hateful people with the word. The same will eventually happen here.

Who said that all communities should be “non toxic” and inclusive?

To this, the following quote is relevant:

Later he describes a more moderated community (the /r/unixporn discord server) as having an environment in which everyone is going to “lick your butthole just to be nice”.

They aren't just tolerating bad behavior in their own community. They take a vocal stance of hatred towards other communities that don't.

but it’s their own community.

So are the proud boys and neonazis. They all start like this by tolerating hate and brushing aside criticism in the name of joke. I don't know where you'd draw a line.

For now though, I think Drew is justified in calling this out. I do use software from people whose political views I cannot agree with. But they all keep their politics and their communities separate. This is not like that. This is one community I want to stay away from. Using their software keeps the possibility of that encounter open. This blog is useful for people like me.

shrimp_emoji2• 3 years ago

This is very a specific and active involvement of a moderator in the act. Such interventions are a gross misuse of moderator privileges in any community.

Oh, they can't express themselves?

They can't express their sentiment of gender abolition because mental illness makes some people care a fuckton about gender?

What cool logic

lijok5• 3 years ago

You're free to have a toxic, noninclusive community. Setup a login window in your discord server that clearly states "This is a toxic, transphobic, homophobic, racist, etc community. By clicking the Agree button you forfeit all rights to being treated with any form of respect and acknowledge you may be attacked, harassed, doxxed and threatened for any reason at any time. If you complain in any way shape or form, you will be immediately blocked without warning."

You can use mee6 to set that up and enjoy your toxic and non-inclusive community.

The absence of any such login window implies that a basic social contract is followed, which this community is clearly in violation of.

the-dude2• 3 years ago

What does a window manager have to do with gender?

sleepycatgirl2• 3 years ago

Basic respect to each other as human beings with self-expression in a community?

the-dude2• 3 years ago

Why would one 'self-express' in a window manager community?

serf• 3 years ago

Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life

speaking of toxic, why the stereotyping? It's not all locker-stuffing and hazing everywhere across the world; I had a blast in high school athletics with friends, and we didn't go out of our way to ruin anyone's day.

When I imagine that I am taken back by memories of camaraderie, pride, friendship, and group motivation towards a goal -- I'm quite sure that wasn't the imagery you wanted to project.

We partook in community service, worked at homeless shelters, the whole gambit. I've probably never been so virtuous as those days.

Not every locker room is filled with hateful machismo, and not every jock is a cruel bully -- don't paint with such wide strokes and expect to keep the details.

now, that said , i'm sorry that you received such treatment, and I hope that you find a friendlier place to direct time and effort; thankfully the DE/WM community is vast enough to find a place that is worth being.

WhyNotHugo• 3 years ago

> Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life speaking of toxic, why the stereotyping?

For a lot of us, "a high school boy's locker room" is just a cliché from US films. We had no equivalent to this in my country; we were expected to shower and get dressed at home and had nothing even remotely similar at school.

It is a cliché. One presented by the US to the world so many times that it has come clear way to express a stereotype.

I sure hope that real-life locker rooms are unlike what you portray in arts and films, but as a foreigner, it's the references we've got.

RamblingCTO3• 3 years ago

I don't know about that. I might get a bit of hate for that, but I'll say it. This pauli person didn't contribute a single thing to the project, afaics. Pushing CoC on projects your not involved in is activism. So don't cry if the projects rejects the proposal. How often did we see, that a CoC was pushed by people like this, pushing out maintainers and creating an echo chamber that slowly dies. I'm certainly very happy that my open source stuff is boring enough to not be targeted by this. Politics makes open source very unattractive to me.

lijok5• 3 years ago

The main theme of the article isn't about the CoC

SuperNinKenDo6• 3 years ago

Agreed. "Somebody made a random issue for a CoC and they didn't agree to do it! It would be so easy to just do it!"

Sorry, but who said they want to? Oh that's right, nobody.

justusw2• 3 years ago

I really appreciate Drew stepping up against harassment in open source communities.

Deciding on a CoC is such a low effort issue, just get it over with!

SuperNinKenDo6• 3 years ago

Deciding on a CoC is such a low effort issue, just get it over with!

They don't want to, it's got nothing to do with "effort".

thiht• 3 years ago

They apparently decided on “none”, which is valid.

I kinda agree with the maintainers here, if it’s an issue, fork it, add your own CoC and manage your own community as you see fit. That’s valid too.

There’s nothing wrong with suggesting to adopt a CoC, but ultimately the maintainers get to decide.

ageofwant• 3 years ago

They did decide. They decided they did not need one. Please respect the decision.

throwawa14223• 3 years ago

I agree. They should merge in the Rule of St. Benedict.

dicytea• 3 years ago

The Wayland community in general do feel like that it's comprised of a lot of young, immature and cliquey members, which is quite unfortunate since it's an interesting technology.

These attitudes can be seen not only in political topics (such as the one described in the article), but also other stuff in general.

For example, sway once forced users who are using Nvidia gpus to type --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia so that the compositor works properly. It's nothing explicitly offensive, but you can see how their attitudes against "unapproved" outgroups oozes out here.

frou_dh• 3 years ago

Nothing wrong with that command-line flag. That's the kind of personality software can be imbued with when you don't have to care about corporate.

memefrog• 3 years ago

Note that sway was written by the author of this blogpost.

justusw2• 3 years ago

I used to feel frustrated about the flag, having bought an Nvidia GPU for ML, not knowing how badly DRM works on it.

I don’t blame the maintainers of a compositor of struggling with Nvidia holding back a proper API? My Intel built in GPU works fine with sway.

I can see how that can be perceived as abrasive, I think Drew tends to polarize opinions from time to time. But this isn’t about purposefully misgendering a person and various other acts of harassment.

aerique4• 3 years ago

Initially ATI was so shit on Linux that I'm still not buying them.

Nvidia 4 Lyfe!!1!

tigrezno• 3 years ago

Radeon is working great these days and with better support on Linux. Wayland works perfectly on it.

opicbk• 3 years ago

Bro since Lisa Su in charge things changed a bit, my 7900xt works like a charm with X and wayland and same did rx580 for few years now, amdgpu is open source driver integrated in kernel of most Linux distributions, its plug an play, just install gpu, turn on the machine, boot into your linux then load amdgpu module reboot, and you can already immediately set ur display on 144hz, try that with my 1080gtx and you are locked at 60 with noveau driver module loaded, until u install their proprietary sheit....

There are many examples of companies and countries that have improved their competitiveness and efficiency by adopting open source strategies. The creation of skills through all levels is of fundamental importance to both companies and countries.

0dayz• 3 years ago

One thing that's lacking from Drew's main point is not asserting why "cracking edgy jokes" or making edgy political statements is useless to an open source community.

Or rather there's no other point other than "please stop being mean", while good, it doesn't merit more than a virtue, in contrast to 4chan style people, they will make make terrible arguments/justifications for being edgy.

The only way to succeed in stamping out toxicity is to have as many strong points about why it shouldn't be tolerated.

zozbot2342• 3 years ago

Look, the solution to FLOSS community issues is not to whine about them on your blog, that's just as toxic as what these folks are doing. It's rather to fork the project under a new name, so that potential contributors who dislike the toxicity (whether or not they're "in the right" about their particular dislikes) have a venue that they can resort to. Everything else is just a big distraction.

version_five• 3 years ago

That wouldn't let people make it about them instead of the project. Fundamentally that's what this stuff is, "my issue is most important" and trying to use popular language and concerns about things being "toxic" to pay attention to them. If they just did a fork, they'd actually have to develop software (or more likely split into groups that disagreed about some other political thing and fight about that)

politelemon• 3 years ago

Look, the solution to FLOSS community issues is not to whine about them on your blog, that's just as toxic as what these folks are doing

It's not the same. A blog post is a great way of raising awareness of issues.

zozbot2342• 3 years ago

The thing about toxicity is that it's harmful to those who are most aware of it, such as marginalized folks. So 'raising awareness' is exactly what should not be done in this case! (Of course Drew is not fully cognizant of this, because of the entrenched privilege that's so common in the FLOSS space.) You should instead lower awareness, by offering something better as an alternative.

umop3plsdn• 3 years ago

Maybe but there's literally NO issue lol

bryanlarsen4• 3 years ago

And how is he supposed to do that? Drew's wlroots is open source so hyperland can use it whether he likes it or not.

eclipseo76• 3 years ago

There have been project that has been forked for these reasons. They never go anywhere because the people forking are not involved in the original community as dev.

SuperNinKenDo6• 3 years ago

who/cares

But in all seriousness, Drew should spend time creating and living in communities with standards he likes, and stay out of those he doesn't. Nobody is being doxxed here, nobody is being harassed outside the community, from what I can tell nothing serious has occurred here except that the discourse in this community is not to Drew's liking

who/cares

bryanlarsen4• 3 years ago

As the creator of wlroots, this is Drew's community whether he likes it or not.

SuperNinKenDo6• 3 years ago

I get what you're saying, but it's really not the case. wlroots and Hyprland are not the same thing just because Hyprland builds on wlroots.

Nor are their respective communities just because there may be overlap in members.

29athrowaway3• 3 years ago

Many people in Discord communities learned English as a second language, and some of them are self-taught.

Some languages are weird and do not use genders at all. People coming from those languages have a hard time dealing with gendered languages such as English.

Some people do not know what misgendering is, or even what a trans person is, or their culture might not deal with that in the same way your cultures does. Probably they have a different term for it or it is taboo for them to talk about it.

Deaf people are about the same percentage of the population as people who identify as trans. Have you learned sign language? when you approach people, do you consider they may not be able to hear you? Why is this?

There are many groups that also amount to 0.6 to 5% of the population yet are more understanding that the rest of the population may not be prepared to address their needs. Not because of malice or hate but because they simply do not know or they come from a different culture.

Seirdy• 3 years ago

Correction: this was not a case of accidental misgendering. The post refers to someone abusing mod privileges to edit someone's pronouns to "who/cares".

29athrowaway3• 3 years ago

And why did that happen?

Hate and intolerance could be one reason, but there are others. Ignorance, immaturity, prejudice and steoreotyping, etc.

And the way to deal with that is through compassion. A good start is to feel sorry for them.

tourmalinetaco2• 3 years ago

In retaliation to said someone making their pronouns their personality rather than focusing on the conversations at hand.

self_awareness• 3 years ago

I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt.
My advice to the leadership begins with taking a serious look in the mirror.

What does this guy talks about? He bans people on Mastodon after 2 messages. He clearly values his ego more than anyone else.

bb010g• 3 years ago

As someone who interacted with Drew back in his calculator days, he has greatly improved since then.

pshirshov• 3 years ago

Well, hyprland has toxic community. The problem is that there is no way to turn off xwayland scaling in Sway, so I don't care about community or whatever if they can deliver working software and sway is broken by design.

nrdxp• 3 years ago

I've seen CoC touted as a singular good destroy at least two communities by now, so you may not realize that your "social reformist" getup is your own personal obsession with your own personal politics, but it's plain to see for the rest of us

mvncleaninst• 3 years ago

Why did Drew all of a sudden start doing this advocacy stuff? Not that I disagree with it, I'm just curious... it feels performative. Like is he trying to prove some kind of point to someone? It's definitely an entertaining read, but I wonder why he pivoted to such a strong degree

friend_and_foe3• 3 years ago

That's rich coming from Drew.

I'm being very hyperbolic, he's a perfectly decent guy, but he is very opinionated and can be pretty harsh with people he disagrees with or that do things he doesn't like. Some would call him toxic, I wouldn't, but I think this word "toxic" is thrown around too much. I've been called toxic for farting. I'm gonna come out and say it: it's just boys being boys. You can chastise me for that position, but people are going to be themselves in the world, we don't need to correct every indecent viewpoint or act of expression that happens anywhere anytime, and we can't. Hyprland is good software, and this comes from a Sway user who has no interest in using Hyprland at all. If some guys in a chatroom want to make dongle jokes or whatever I think you've got to be looking for reasons to be mad to make a big deal out of it.

snapplebobapple• 3 years ago

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity

wesapien2• 3 years ago

Seems like everything can be perceived as hate/toxic especially when there is an asymmetric relationship between the sacred/protected vs everyone else. It's like dealing with police, anything you say can and will be used against you. I will limit all comms with people who wield that much power over me. It like talking to a landmine.

Hyprland Is a Toxic Community

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