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Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

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Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#11

Post by xtanx »

marvel_boy wrote: post #4

Are you serious? Complaining about needing a zillion steps to compile equals "to be mean"?

They are talking about the tone of the message. "it shouldn't be this hard" is not the proper way to report a bug at least not in a neutral way. It has the intention to make the maintainer feel bad and increase the likelihood of a change. And that was just in the title.

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#12

Post by atoav »

I think the people with the mean comments are rarely active open source developers/contributers themselves — that is consumer-mentality on display.

If you are a good open source contributer and you know better you either write a pull request or you write a suggestion how a better installation process would look like, what your pain points were etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#13

Post by xtanx »

You know... they could be just another malicious actor. I mean they appeal to emotions, github is not showing them as active in the community, pseudonym without any details in the profile. And by malicious actor I do not mean that they are trying to gain access, they could be just trolling Larhzu.

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#14

Post by readthenotes1 »

xtanx wrote: post #11
marvel_boy wrote: post #4

Are you serious? Complaining about needing a zillion steps to compile equals "to be mean"?

They are talking about the tone of the message. "it shouldn't be this hard" is not the proper way to report a bug at least not in a neutral way. It has the intention to make the maintainer feel bad and increase the likelihood of a change. And that was just in the title.

And yet, "it shouldn't be this hard" is an incredibly pertinent observation perhaps with the intention to make the maintainer understand that offloading tons of work on many other people has an impact.

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#15

Post by thih9 »

Risking stating the obvious, the linked issue[1] seems appropriate for stack overflow, but not a good fit for github.

It would have been a good github issue if there were no instructions in the project. If the instructions are too difficult, then write how you would improve them. If steps are missing or incorrect, report that. Otherwise post to stack overflow.

Both: closing the github issue or treating it as an incomplete bug report seems fine to me. The maintainers are doing the latter, I’d say this is a good response.

[1]: https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/issues/121

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#16

Post by jmclnx »

A long time ago (many decades), when I started out, someone who started in computers in the 1950s said to me "You can easily tell if your program is liked and popular. When something goes wrong, people will loose their temper and complain to you and sometimes insult you".

I have found this to be true over the years. So I always took the complaints as something good :)

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#17

Post by drivingmenuts »

They're mean because there aren't the same kinds of consequences as there are for being mean to someone you know IRL. If you and I actually knew each other, consequences could range from a "Yo, dude, not cool" to some rather illegal escalations because you would know enough about me to actually find me.

On the internet, you have my username and that's about it. You might be able to piece together enough info to come after me, but you'd have to be really motivated.

Being mean is cheap, effective retribution isn't.

Re: Ask HN: Why are people so mean in the open source community? (about xz again)

#18

Post by rsynnott »

I would say that it’s not so much that people are mean; most people are not. The median person in the open source community is perfectly fine. It’s just that the open source community writ large seems particularly bad at dealing with and excluding arseholes, and attempts to do so often don’t go over well.
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