RFC 98 Chat | 41 Members | |
| Discussion on RFC 98 [Community Team] https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98 | 17 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Nov 2021 | ||
| and I can tell you what specifically were the issues that we ran into with said unnamed person on IRC, but that's only ever going to be an illustration of a broader cultural issue | 11:35:52 | |
| not the full picture of what this RFC is trying to accomplish | 11:36:13 | |
| * | 11:37:13 | |
| * | 11:37:18 | |
In reply to @joepie91:pixie.townI was very probably talking about somebody else, but that illustrates the point: hang around for long enough and you'll see those things come up here and there eventually. | 11:37:22 | |
| Emil Karlson: okay, so essentially they were doing the Just Asking Questions thing where they were framing things as a 'debate', while making hurtful and/or ignorant and/or bigoted comments in the process, or asking loaded 'questions' that were really just abusive statements masquerading behind a question mark. this happened repeatedly, and it turned out to be very difficult to call out what they were doing, because the mere framing of it as a 'debate' almost magically excluded their behaviour from scrutiny from the perspective of a number of community members, who pattern-matched it as a "we should keep communicating and keep asking critical questions" argument (which would normally be a good thing), but who failed to recognize a) the bad-faith intentions behind it, and b) the impact that it was having on making the channel uncomfortable for others. so when calling out their behaviour, instead of the discussion going towards "we should make sure to remain empathic and respectful and inclusive and this is what you can do to make the community a nicer place for others", it veered towards "but I have a right to freedom of speech", which incidentally is precisely what you see happening in the alt-right (including gab) - and more importantly, this pulled along some community members who are less familiar with the dynamics behind bigotry and who took the 'debate' and 'free speech' argument at face value | 11:43:07 | |
| this is the major cultural problem in many tech circles, and while it is less present in the NixOS community than many others, it's still very much there: people think too much in terms of 'rational [adversarial] debate' under the belief that it is a technically optimal path to answers, and not enough in terms of the human on the other end whose emotional state is impacted in some way by what others say | 11:44:34 | |
| but in the reactive viewpoint, was that the typical case of an issue in nixos community? | 11:44:48 | |
| or more like there is no typical case? | 11:45:11 | |
| the NixOS community has so far been small enough that not many of these cases have surfaced; I can also certainly say that there are not many people with problematic viewpoints and bad-faith intentions like this, at least not yet... so indeed there isn't much of a 'typical case' simply because the community has been small and cohesive enough so far | 11:45:42 | |
| but... that is changing, especially over the past year, as NixOS is rapidly gaining adoption and airtime in tech circles | 11:45:56 | |
| so my concern, personally, isn't "the NixOS community is full of nazis" (metaphorical or otherwise), but rather that "the NixOS community does not have the shared culture and tools necessary to deal with it when we do get a bunch of nazis" | 11:46:35 | |
| (of course this isn't limited to fascists, it also applies to more interpersonal abusive behaviour, but this is just to use less words :p) | 11:47:04 | |
| so I do not believe that we currently have a lot of problematic people, just that we should be prepared for when we do | 11:47:28 | |
| because any tech community that becomes notable enough will attract them, and they can very rapidly take over if you're not careful | 11:47:48 | |
| I guess that you could see Eternal September as a form of prior art here; while there was definitely a strong factor there of "AOL didn't do their due diligence in not wrecking the community", part of the problem there was also that the community was not prepared to deal with the influx of new people and the resulting cultural conflicts | 11:49:16 | |
| that's just one fairly well-documented instance, though; this same dynamic has played out many hundreds of times in many hundreds of communities since, that experienced sudden growth | 11:49:53 | |
| probably thousands, even | 11:50:14 | |
| does that make sense? :p | 11:52:41 | |
| thanks for the reply, I don't know eternal september, but in general makes sense | 12:05:14 | |
| (I can google, if I need it probably) | 12:05:32 | |
| Emil Karlson: the very short summary of Eternal September is that usenet (ie. newsgroups) used to be pretty tight-knit, small community of technologically-aligned people, kind of like a local bar, with the comparative inaccessibility of the technology serving as a gatekeeping measure; and then AOL decided to offer wide-open usenet access to all(?) of its subscribers and suddenly there was a huge influx of new people who knew nothing about the technology, and more importantly, who knew nothing about the unwritten social rules of the existing community... and so they steamrolled the existing community, pretty much, and the existing community was too small to effectively handle the influx, and the fact that the social norms were implicit rather than explicit caused a lot of arguments to break out because nobody had a clear reference | 12:08:08 | |
| ryblade: GallantChef: I've just finally gotten around to reading the backlog. a couple of observations:
| 13:08:41 | |
| (I'm addressing both of you as one, in this case, because you were heavily bouncing off each other in the logs and seem to roughly state the same views and arguments) | 13:11:45 | |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈: you keep making extraordinary claims and making references to abstract looming threats, it's really not helpful to the conversation. Please consider that it's possible to win a conversation rhetorically, and still not generate more shared understanding. | 13:40:44 | |
| I want to learn more about what issues we have today, so if you see anything, please send it my way | 13:44:34 | |
| I really need specific items, in order to understand all the points of views | 13:46:00 | |
| my experience with the nix community in the past has been really positive, I was generally impressed by people's tolerance and understanding for each other's point of views. It's only once we started adding politics that things started being sour. Now I read that this hasn't been the case for everybody, and that sucks, and I want to better understand these issues. | 13:51:14 | |
| there are existing technical leadership issues which make people bounce, but those are separate from moderation issues, unless you include moderation to resolve technical issues as well | 13:52:42 | |
| I know I'm being naive but I really hope that we can focus more on our shared love of technology and the project instead of our differences | 13:56:22 | |