Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is a…
> [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-yo ... This is the kind of thing I'm asking about. Lots of numbers are trotted out but where's the actual data? Where's the methodology? The blurb says, "This talk will teach you, using quantified data and academic research from the social sciences, about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and how you can begin to repair…
It's not a perfect science, but that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the best option, or that we can't just use common sense for that matter. If someone joins a community space and their first interaction is being insulted then the chance that they will come back is lower than if they're not insulted. I don't think you need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept this basic point, just as we don't need a whole lot of rigorous science to accept that dogs can feel pain, have an emotional life, have different personalities, etc.
> That said, I agree asshole behaviour has to be reigned in, but exile is pretty dramatic if you really think about it. It's super easy and I think that's why people do it, but that doesn't make it good option.
It sure is dramatic! Like I said, I don't really have the full story on this, so it's very hard for me to judge if it's proportional. I don't think the decision was made lightly as everyone involved realized it's not J. Random Gopher but a fairly well-known person within the community.
Related story: in a community (unrelated to Go) I once sent a message to someone asking them not to insult people; pretty basic unambiguous "you can't call people idiots here" kind of stuff. They were also very helpful in other cases and I knew they were going to be sensitive about it, so I sent the kindest kid-gloves message I could come up with; no threats of any actions, just "hey, can you not do this here?" They just replied with "no, I will not change, fuck off". So ... I (temporarily) banned them. What else was I supposed to do at this point? Let them continue anyway even though it was clearly inappropriate? Anyone looking on might think "gosh, did you really have to ban them for those remarks? It wasn't that bad?" Not unreasonable, but ... they also weren't aware of the conversation I had with them, and their reply. No one made any remarks about it, but if they did, I wouldn't have commented on it because it's still a private conversation.
This is the kind of stuff we may be unaware of. In my first message I mentioned "unreceptive to criticism of it (often getting pretty defensive/aggressive)" for a reason. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but from what I've seen in public cases where people commented on his behaviour I expect things didn't go swimmingly. It's one thing to screw up at times and at least acknowledge you screwed up, but it's quite another thing to be consistently dismissive about any concerns and outright reject the idea there is anything wrong with your behaviour. I expect that this attitude played a large factor in the decision.