Abusing Contributors is not OK

http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/01/abuse-is-not-ok.html

by JoshTriplett • 12 years ago

77 58 12 years ago

I found this well worth reading. Note the section "Ideas and code are still fair game", which points out that eliminating bad behavior from a community does not prevent project maintainers and leaders from taking good code and complaining about bad code, as long as they don't tear down people in the process. Frequently, when this issue comes up in the Open Source community, it produces flippant responses about how behaving better would prevent telling people their code or even their core idea is broken.

npsimons2• 12 years ago

I believe that while Linus' attitude could be better, it is understandable. Not that I'm excusing it, it's just that almost all the times you see someone pointing out him being an asshole, you can go back up the email chain to find the person he's being an asshole to being obtuse. Combine this with a deep care that Linus has for his "baby", and tons of crap trying to get past the radar on a regular basis, and it's understandable his reactions are what they are.

Similar situations arise in communities where denial and/or subterfuge are common tactics, such as climate change denial and creationism. Just look up the term "sea lioning".

That being said, I am for more diverse opinions, which I think you only truly get when you have more diverse points of view, which is why I agree that prejudice is a very bad thing. What is interesting to me, though, is I have yet to see prejudice from eg Linus. He's mean, yes, but he tends to "spread the love" (as the kernel management guide puts it) fairly evenly and not based on prejudice. Of course, I might just not be seeing this because I'm a white straight cis male.

Last but not least, I agree that ideas and code are fair game for criticism. Unfortunately, sometimes people associate with their ideas (and sometimes code too) and take it as a personal insult when their idea or code is criticised.

jrochkind13• 12 years ago

obtuse: "stupid or unintelligent : not able to think clearly or to understand what is obvious or simple"

Why is it understandable that someone is an asshole to someone else who is not as smart as they are?

I mean, I guess it's all understandable, I understand some of why people are assholes, sure. But it's harmful to ourselves and our projects.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 12 years ago

This: "Not that I'm excusing it," is the same kind of weaselly phrasing as "I'm not racist, but".

metaphorm3• 12 years ago

really? another diatribe about Linus? get over it. Linus is the way he is. dealing with him requires thick skin, and he knows it, and we know it, and anyone working with him needs to deal with it.

do you think complaining about him on the internet is going to get Linus to change? what's the point here?

there's also an awful lot of false equivalency and inappropriate analogy going on here. I don't think Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian have ANYTHING WHATEVER to do with Linus' communication style. Invoking their names here is an effort to summon a twitter shitstorm and its pretty low in my opinion.

zorpner3• 12 years ago

really? another diatribe about Linus? get over it. Linus is the way he is.

What a sad, accepting attitude. The fact is that people are more aware than ever than his behavior is unacceptable. They talk about it more and more often every year, and that trend will continue. Eventually, he won't be able to make a public appearance (in person or online) without getting called out on his completely unnecessary and hostile behavior. Then he'll either change or be shunted into irrelevance, and it will be a net positive for the Linux community.

Fame and accomplishment are no license to be uncivil.

metaphorm3• 12 years ago

he's not uncivil. he's just blunt. the fact is, Linus does the right thing when it matters. you might not like the way he writes emails on the developer mailing list. you might think he swears too much or uses too much hyperbole. it doesn't matter though.

what you're advocating here is censorship and ostracism of one of the most important people in the FOSS world. think about that for a few minutes. you're advocating censorship and ostracism. who's uncivil now?

edit: and now you've downvoted me for disagreeing. more "civil" behavior being demonstrated here.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

I agree in part, as much as someone can hate Linus' style, it's worthwhile to have a toolset to work with people that operate on slightly different social scripts [0] that you want to.

You call this having a thick skin, but I think there is a distinction between not taking offense when directed your way, and not finding the statement offensive in the first place. There is a sliding scale of what levels of language imply what levels of offense and it changes depending on context. And this is just one of many properties in evaluation of environment.

I've started thinking participants in social environments have an at-least-4-tuple for every context: their desired, expected, perceived, and actual social setting. And a tuple exists for every possible context.

The thing that makes for a hostile environment isn't that Linus' posts are "No Big Deal" or a "Big Deal, Indeed", but that people disagree in their desires on how the setting should treat a Linus rant. Especially when there are people that not only expect their opinion to win, but make it imperative to their politics that the culture adapt to them rather than the other way around.

Programming is the most tame, calm, and soft-spoken professional environment I've ever been in. I'm used to adjusting my expectation for social scripts for different environments. I've learned to be comfortable in environments with innocuous swearing and ranting elsewhere, I can take it here too. In the end I don't really care which way we go, but the fighting is certainly getting on my nerves.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_script

dnautics2• 12 years ago

Nice != Good

Niceness is about worrying about how other people feel. Sometimes caring about other people's feelings (especially in the short term) can lead to duplicitous, decietful, dihonest, fraudulent, counterproductive or wasteful behaviors.

Being "good" in a sense is optimizing against those behaviors, which usually is an orthogonal concern to niceness, but sometimes leads to distinctly being not nice. I can't say one way or another if Linus is overoptimizing, but given a choice between niceness and goodness, I pick goodness.

comrh2• 12 years ago

Niceness is about worrying about how other people feel.

I really disagree. Niceness is about CONSIDERING people's feelings. Not overly worrying or bending to them or self censoring but just being aware of your effect on other people. Linus seems to be aware but thinks that considering other people is a waste of time and I think that is a pretty toxic attitude.

dnautics2• 11 years ago

I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word here. The important thing here is not worrying/considering but "feel".

I would guess that Linus makes a categorical distinction between emotional and physical welfare - because emotional welfare is ill-defined and easy to manipulate from the 'reciever's' point of view, he considers it at worst a waste of time or at best a secondary consideration after definable things, like achieving a software objective.

jrochkind13• 12 years ago

Sometimes caring about other people's feelings (especially in the short term) can lead to duplicitous, decietful, dihonest, fraudulent, counterproductive or wasteful behaviors.

I think this is a lie that liars tell themselves. When you say you are lying to spare someone else's feelings -- what you really care about is your own feelings, protecting yourself from having to deal with their reaction to the truth.

I think it's lying and lack of concern for the truth that actually lead to counterproductive and wasteful behaviors. Have you ever worked somewhere where nobody trusts each other and nobody tells the truth about what's going on? I think many of us have. How's that situation for productivity?

Neither the OP nor anyone else is asking Linus to lie about anything.

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

Linus is one of the few brilliant jerks out there who is truly brilliant. Unfortunately his antics have made it OK for lots of less talented individuals to think they have the right to treat people like dirt in order to write good code.

He's exceptional in my opinion but I often wonder what the OSS community would be like without behavior like his. I recall not wanting to major in CS when I entered school because the only programmers I knew when I was young were from newsgroups, forum, and OSS communities that I perused as kid...and they all seemed like assholes. I'm glad I changed by mind cause I was so interested but thick skin shouldn't be the bar for contributing to tech.

edit: I'm certainly not defending Linus. His talent makes him a net positive but he definitely should not treat people the way he does.

jdonaldson• 12 years ago

It always seems like jerks are better at handling other jerks than non-jerks. A jerk-led project may be more sustainable for that reason in the long run. I can think of numerous situations where contributing jerks (in the minority) did more to harm a project than the person leading the project.

rektide3• 12 years ago

Flipping off a bad hardware company, writing some scathing roasts of patches... he's obviously not checking himself into staid polite behavior, absolutely. The extent to which this makes him a jerk, or makes him bossy is a connection that I've always felt is tenuous at best.

Even his meanest patch roasts are things that I'd hope people realize can be taken in stride; technical work will have to go in but work can progress, and Linus is not forebearing, he's not enhancing the difficulty of doing that technical work by being directly scathing to the existing work, and generally (what I think most people regards as) humorous and spirited to the rest of the readership.

What I haven't seen is any real attempt to find citeable referencable direct impacts of Linus being flamboyant as he produces his technical outlook. Which contributors have taken serious injury, and how has it impacted them? Certainly contributing is hard and finding out the work needs to be redone is hard: what measures can we assign to how much harder those necessary acts are when it's a "jerk"-y delivery (which as I said is not a term I'm not confident is appropriate or applicable). Rather than focus on Linus's behavior as problematic and the emphasis of it being a deeply stemmed root cause, I'd like to see some hard impact-analysis with good data behind it that gives a better idea of why we should adopt strict tone-policing of the necessary harsh and brutal technical review process.

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

Patch roasts aren't the issue; roasting contributors is. Telling someone their code is awful is not normally a problem. Telling someone they personally are awful for even having submitted it, and that they should have been "retroactively aborted" or any number of worse statements, is absolutely ridiculous.

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

"Kay, this needs to be fixed.

Suggested fix: just use the 'seq_printf()' interfaces, which do the proper buffering, and allow any size reads of various packetized data.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" - linus https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495

do you want some data on the people who don't even bother dealing with sort of talk? he could easily replace the second paragraph with something like

"This is an extremely bad way of doing things; reading one byte of a time is terrible. Please research the system calls you are using before submitting another patch, it's unacceptable to submit code that hasn't been thought through thoroughly."

sadfaceunread2• 12 years ago

Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

jrochkind13• 12 years ago

I disagree. Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others. Environments where emotionally aggressive communications are the norm have a whole lot to do with gender roles in our society. And how someone deals with such an environment is effected by their gender socialization too, such environments are perceived and dealt with differently, as a generalized trend, by women and men. (yes, individual men and women can be on both ends of it, at different times).

barsonme• 12 years ago

Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others.

My parents sure didn't raise me that way. Honestly, a large reason why so many people are aggressive when they communicate is simply because they just don't know how to communicate. It's not a male thing, nor is it a female thing.

It's a "I'm unable to express my unhappiness regarding this scenario in a well-thought out and respectful way, so I'm going to lob some insults at you to make my point" thing.

My dad used to say that if you need to swear then you've obviously lost the ability to express your opinion in an articulate, and polite way. I don't 100% agree with that statement, but it does have some truth to it when you apply it a bit differently.

If you can't tell somebody their code is bad without berating them for even being born it's not because you're a man or a woman, you either have a condition which prevents you from recognizing you're being a dick or you do not know how to communicate like a civilized human.

Being assertive, constructive, and listening well are three ways to be able to communicate like a decent person. Being subservient or aggressive, destructive, and failing to listen are three/four ways to communicate like a person with a lack of social skills.

zxcvcxz6• 12 years ago

I don't take anything seriously that tells me to review the "geek feminism" wiki.

These "geek feminists" tell people they have to follow a moral code they make up on the spot then when someone says something they deem is "inappropriate" they bully them and accuse them of horrible things that aren't true. This actually happens and isn't debatable.

What I personally really don't like about these people is that they go after open source specifically, which leads me to believe many of them have never worked for a large company but only have experience in the open source sector, which by it's nature allows anyone to participate.

I mean, accusing open source of being intolerant or whatever is like an alien race accusing the human species of being intolerant because they observed that --yes-- when you allow people to live in a society freely some people make decisions others (gasp) disagree with.

These geek feminists should all go close their source and only allow people to work with them who they deems is tolerable. A Big corporation --no matter how progressive they may seem from the outside-- is always going to have someone working for them that says some stupid shit. Look at the racist emails in the wake of the sony leak from some of their top people.

I don't want a monoculture of people pretending to be nice. Blaming open source is just a way to push an agenda.

If this "geek feminist crowd" wants to fork off and do their own thing and base it around being nice to each other then it's just a matter of time until their top devs get exposed for being human and they look like idiots. The geek feminist community seems to contain more assholes than any open source community I've ever been a part of, in fact I've worked with a few feminists who have said some very nasty things about people of a certain color. Unfortunately, the JavaScript crowd seems to have a lot of feminsits and I had the displeasure of working with a JS developer who was a rich white straight male feminist asshole google employee. He would talk about how hard minorities have it on his personal blog and then get on github/irc and treat everyone like shit. Pretty typical geek feminist in my experience.

comrh2• 12 years ago

I really don't think you have a very good handle on what you're railing against. Especially because at the end you conflate diversity in FOSS with criticism of Linus' attitude. This just reads like you have a really big axe to grind against your reading of feminism.

zxcvcxz6• 12 years ago

I'm not the one whose conflating diversity with Linus' attitude, that would be the feminists.

edit: please hn, tell me where I'm wrong.

My whole point is that making this a matter of diversity is wrong and only done to push a political agenda.

It's not Linus who is saying anything against any race or gender. He's being mean and then some people calling themselves "feminists" are coming in and saying "being mean to people is so much harder if you're a minority, so therefore open source is racist".

I'm not conflating diversity with anything. Just pointing out that that's what the geek feminists are doing.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 12 years ago

"accusing open source of being intolerant or whatever is like an alien race accusing the human species of being intolerant "

Following this analogy implies that women are categorically Outside of the open source community, which I bet is actually what you meant to say.

zxcvcxz6• 12 years ago

So now I'm a misogynist? Thanks for proving my whole point.

sharpneli• 12 years ago

I wonder why they have mixed feminism on this.

If we look at posts of Linus he is an equal opportunity jerk. He bashes people solely because they have made a bad commit or suggested something absolutely braindead even if they should have known better, regardless of their gender.

You can say he is jerk but you cannot say he is misogynist.

zxcvcxz6• 12 years ago

I wonder why they have mixed feminism on this.

It's about pushing a political agenda.

thramp• 12 years ago

"Equal opportunity jerk" seems alright at first thought, but when you consider that people of different races/genders have different social standing, it's clear that some people will be disproportionately affected by others being "equal opportunity jerks".

Plus, being an "equal opportunity jerk" is not a good policy at all — it's downright abusive. No one should be verbally berated in public for writing code that's not up to the maintainer's snuff.

mcguire2• 12 years ago

There's a lesson here.

Once upon a time, I worked for IBM. At this time and in this place, decisions were made at IBM based not on evaluating ideas, but on who talked loudest. I watched a lot of good ideas get shot down, or more frequently just ignored, because nobody vocal felt like supporting them or because someone vocal decided the idea wasn't in their best interests. I also watched a crap-ton of really shitty ideas rise to the top and get a fucking load of money wasted on them because the set of people who can identify good ideas and the set of people who are loud do not have a very large intersection.

Fortunately for IBM, it's a large company with nearly unlimited resources and its position as the most successful technology company will never be seriously threatened. Particularly its office systems, AIX, and PowerPC directions are world-leading.

(For those of you with Asperger syndrome, that last paragraph was sarcasm. And yes, I'm looking squarely at Larry Loucks.)

zxcvcxz6• 12 years ago

I'm all for civility, but unfortunately it seems the people who are complaining about the loud assholes are attempting to conflate "being rude" with "being anti-feminist" and therefore "being a racist misogynist".

I'm not about twisting peoples words to push the feminist agenda.

edit: please HN, enlighten me before you down vote. Are you guys against the civility part or do you disagree that people are conflating rudeness with being racist?

rektide3• 12 years ago

Your case is fair, and your advice is solid, but no one is sure it's appropriate. At IBM there is a distinct chain of command and people who have to interact with each other and a corporate body every day. A technical mailing list can certainly suffer from domineering people monopolizing the conversation as well, but most evidence we have of this- Systemd debates in Debian, Gentoo- show a much more overt structural deficiency going on in a far more pervasive fashion than what is found on LKML.

Look at the outcome in problem cases- whereas in a contained social environment- a business- the containment ends in creative control ending up in the lands of the domineering group, in mailing lists we tend to rampant infighting and shifting lines of battle amongst larger parties. The 1:1 1:few defined hierarchies and political power-games of a business have few clear places we can draw parity to on a highly-trafficed mailing list: dissent resisting the domineering force is highly visible and contested, and conflict spreads as people weigh in and the conversation threads-out and threads are linked into one another.

mcguire2• 12 years ago

You make a very good point, but I think you may be over-weighting the "chain of command" aspect of the corporate body and under-weighting the "flame-fests are fun, but somebody has to make a decision" aspect of a mailing list discussion.

My personal favorite result of the latter are trigraphs in the C standard. Nobody liked them, but nobody argued strongly against them because they were introduced so late.

MadManE• 12 years ago

What a charged headline. Of course abuse is not ok - anytime, to anyone. Cramming the word into this title is pure incitement.

sadfaceunread2• 12 years ago

I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online discourse.

joeyh• 12 years ago

This post was flagkilled off the front page, and then unkilled after mgj59 raised a stink about it.

<mjg59> Hey @paulg you've created a website catering to people unwilling to even discuss the existence of an abusive culture http://t.co/1vnEA27kKL

dang• 12 years ago

No one involved in unkilling that story knew about any stinks. This is just routine moderation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931377.

In such cases the variations in rank come from the community being divided and thus both upvoting and flagging the story.

A_COMPUTER2• 12 years ago

Torvalds is being dogpiled . This is the third or fourth article I've read in the last month that has tried to conflate Linus Torvalds sometimes being rude with the horrendous, persistrent, ongoing harassment/abuse that is being carried out by completely different people, in completely different industry.

If Torvalds is going to be used, is it too much to ask to stick to the things he has done and not lump him together with death threats, SWATing, etc? Like, catalog what HE said, in their context, and discuss those? Because I really don't think they are comparable, and the conflation is disingenuous.

jneen• 12 years ago

If he is, it's pretty tame compared to the treatment of those who criticize him, and those who claim to support those who criticize him.

felipeerias• 12 years ago

That is one of the scariest aspects of all this: there is an aggressive Internet mob that does nothing of value for Free SW, but will come in full force any time that an issue like this one is debated in the open, and will stop at nothing to ruin the life of those they identify as enemies.

Encouraging civility and attracting new contributors are very important goals for the future of Free SW. Achieving that will help us create better products that can be useful for more people.

Therefore, having all this harassment and hate come up whenever there is talk about improving the community is tremendously hurtful. It is sabotage, that's what it is.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 12 years ago

Has he condemned his supporters' treatment of Shanley and other critics? If they're doing it in his name, his silence implies approval.

A_COMPUTER2• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell, the abuse all originated from a board on 8chan. As I said, I that is so far away from what he does that I don't even see them on the same continuum. Also,

his silence implies approval.

No it doesn't. He probably doesn't even know about this. If he did, have you considered he might be scared to speak up?

rodgerd• 12 years ago

Torvalds is being dogpiled .

Since he isn't a nice person and likes arguing, in his own words, why would he care? And why are so many white knights worried about his precious fe-fes? That's what Linus is arguing for, feelings don't matter, only ideas, right?

KVFinn• 12 years ago

Instead, what I do care about, passionately, is helping the best ideas win (where I include "feasible" as part of my definition of "best"). Not the "best ideas from people willing to tolerate extensive personal abuse".

Applicable in many different areas.

Abusing Contributors is not OK

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