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Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

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221–230 of 241 posts

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people seem to just inherently be a bit nasty Those people could think the same thing about you. "amount of nastyness" it's not an internationally recognized standard unit of measure and it depends a lot on culture, status, social class, and a lot of other more subtle things. You can't even imagine how many stereotypes on Italians I have to endure in a normal, professional, conversation with North Americans, w…

If 90% of the community think you’re a jerk then it’s probably you that’s the jerk.

So basically every anti-minority society? Be it mostly white people with black people, mostly Christian ones with Jews, etc.

What I am trying to say is 90% white people and them thinking that black people are drug dealers isn't exactly unheard of.

And you can basically go back decade by decade over history with such situations. What makes you think that minority is more right now about someone being just bad/a jerk?

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant jerks almost always have a net negative impact on a project when you factor in their adverse effects on their teammates. The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.

The Vim/Neovim is a great natural experiment on this. Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it. And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim u…

To be fair, people who spend a lot of time customising vim (eg embedding a terminal, building half an IDE) seems to be very much the target market for neovim.

I use regular vim because I don't want to think about my editor, I just want it to work.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant jerks almost always have a net negative impact on a project when you factor in their adverse effects on their teammates. The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.

The Vim/Neovim is a great natural experiment on this. Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it. And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim u…

Brad is nice, don't try to soil his reputation because you disagree with him on the features he wants to bring into VIM

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... it's not a question of "I declared it, so you will do it". It's a question of "You broke the rules once; you can stay in timeout for a week or we can ban you entirely". Would you be bothered if they'd skipped the first part and just banned them from their gruop for making trouble?

I am fine with any judgment Mozilla make on infrastructure that they run and that belongs directly to the project, such as mailing lists, official chatrooms, etc. It's the addition of "unofficial" social platforms that irks me; it seems totalitarizing. Interaction of contributors outside the project ecosystem is none of their business. I prefer for society to be sliced "horizontally", rather than "vertically". I am n…

> Only, what happened was that it turns out you can't be a Mozilla employee and a certain kind of Republican in the same person

It was worse than that. Folks called for his blood over a past endorsement of / financial support for California's Prop 8 and a Republican congressman (one who, at the time, was one of the few congresspersons at all - let alone among the Republicans - who even so much as paid lip service to the idea of electronic freedom and privacy). It didn't seem like any attempt was made to even so much as ask if he still supported that Proposition and that congressman - and that's a pretty reasonable question to ask when a large number of Democrat (and more modest number of Republican) voters and politicians alike have indeed shifted from opposing to supporting gay marriage and broader GSRM rights. Maybe he does indeed still oppose gay marriage, and that's why he decided to step down instead of trying to defend himself. Who knows?

On the other hand, there's a pretty stark difference between "Mozilla employee" v. "CEO of Mozilla". It wasn't until he was appointed as CEO that his political leanings attracted criticism - and it's pretty reasonable to be critical of whether someone can objectively and fairly manage an entire organization and its employees while having contributed money toward the passage of a law that actively discriminated against at least some subset of said employees. Eich's situation seems much more understandable than attempting to excommunicate an ordinary contributor.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more the idea of an organization claiming they have the authority to forbid you from tweeting at members . It's like they're trying to split the world into two halves, organization members and outsiders, draw a fence around the organization membership and assume control over who is allowed to cross that fence and how. To be clear: I don't think any organization should ever have that sort of power. If it was just…

I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of ** and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. In terms of "this sort of power", you are of course welcome to ignore them asking you to not tweet at them -- just don't expect to be allow…

> I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234.

I think this is more a matter of tone being hard to convey over text than such statements actually being harassment. Technical debt is more often than not nobody's fault in particular, yet often elicits similar commentary - and at least in in-person conversations, it's almost always clear that the commentary is directed at the code itself, not at the author - and hell, quite a few programmers will readily say such things about their own code (myself included).

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#227
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not to the person telling you they do not agree with you. so you're basically cherry picking. it is called selection bias. > maybe they are too kind to tell you the truth, who knows. You don't know the people I communicate with and what they say, what we discuss, and what feedback they provide. Also, having selection bias amongst ~300 (possibly more) people in 15 years is fat chance . Let's not assume, please.…

Not the one you are answering to, but reading along and what is the chance of 300+ people all having the same standard?

> Not the one you are answering to, but reading along

Doesn't matter, welcome.

> what is the chance of 300+ people all having the same standard?

Practically zero, and that's the point. The net effect is being exposed as different views as possible. Throw them to each other and to your standards, and see what comes out.

You'll find things you like and don't like; discover new niches and your mistakes, and the things you got right from your perspective. You'll evolve yourself slowly but surely, and build a bigger picture of this world during the journey.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#228
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 90% of the community think you’re a jerk then it’s probably you that’s the jerk.

So basically every anti-minority society? Be it mostly white people with black people, mostly Christian ones with Jews, etc. What I am trying to say is 90% white people and them thinking that black people are drug dealers isn't exactly unheard of. And you can basically go back decade by decade over history with such situations. What makes you think that minority is more right now about someone being just bad/a jerk?

It doesn’t matter if I think they’re right or not - it’s their community.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#229
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, there is a huge difference between "negative feedback" -- I don't think any project is saying you can't reply something like "This PR should not be merged, because there are significant problems. For example, line Q causes a memory leak, and lines A-B are so complicated I can't figure out if there is a buffer overflow or not". If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get…

> If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get banned, let me know. From the email we are discussing: > Using facts to excuse disrespectful language.In a number of conversations where you have been called out for communicating disrespectfully, you counter by stating what you said is a fact. While in many cases it is truly a fact, the way in which you convey these facts has not…

> if someone says they have been harmed through your words or actions, listen carefully, apologize sincerely, and correct the behavior going forward.

This is very much open to abuse

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#230
Good for him. Mozilla has drastically changed from what it used to be a decade ago. And it's nice that people are forking their old products and actually getting work done with them, without the orgs toxic culture. Hopefully someone, or another org, can pickup Firefox and do the same.
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