We Need to Talk About Docker Hub

I agree only in part. Specifically, I agree that rejection brings out the worst in people and sometimes it's better to not engage in follow-up conversations about rejection. I have interviewed my share of problematic applicants and we should not make excuses for employers to behave badly due to bad applicant behavior.

Courtesy starts with the giver. If someone chooses to not be equipped, then you have done your job by attempting courtesy, nothing more is required.

While there's a lot of awful behavior, I have found complete silence (no initial rejection) triggers worse behavior. For example, silence leads to people constantly reaching out, rightfully wanting to know status. Moreover, it greatly encourages the psychotic people to bombard you with craziness via any means of contact. For that reason, an initial response that a person is rejected is enough typically.

Courtesy is not hard and saying so is concerning. While people may have different reactions, a simple sentence is a courtesy and a thank you, nothing beyond that is required. Still, I admit reading this site sometimes makes me think basic humanity is a challenge for many people. Unfortunately, those people seem to be in charge of hiring at many companies.

All you have to do in a job context is respond at least once - thank you, but no. If the other person does not see a simple email as courtesy, that is their problem. A response is a universal courtesy, no response is a universal insult. I can understand not wanting to engage further, however.

No response at all is also demeaning. It takes seconds to formulate an initial rejection response. If someone presses you, simply reply with that dreaded canned response + simply use their name. If you want to further personalize things in either case, you pick 1 detail you remember to sound more genuine, which for a functioning human should be quite easy.

If you want something more dry in a follow-up, you can say that for legal reasons, you are not allowed or comfortable discussing further, but you wish the person luck. That covers all the normal people, and for crazies, you have no choice either way but at least this has a chance of getting them to go away. What you are saying is that people are not even worth seconds of your time, especially people who potentially invested hours, weeks, or even months in the process. I would hope any reasonable person is above this.

Lastly, a response is important because it allows people to prioritize and further their job search. If you keep someone hanging, it can have huge implications that I should not have to explain. There are many other problems it can cause as well. As an example, I once applied for a job I thought I wanted because the company confused me with someone else and their SOP was silence. They stopped responding to my inquiries which insulted me so much, I rejected their subsequent offer when the mistake was caught. Another example - a company scheduled interviews for me and just didn't show up, making me have to leave my wife alone in the hospital at the time which I only did because my job search was that important at that time financially.

Honestly, I'm so tired of the attitude of companies and people on here validating unprofessional and awful behavior. If it were legal and without issue, I'd make a list and publicly shame. The only redemption is that when someone can't even be human enough to respond to you, working at their company would be a miserable experience. Still, that does not help when you waste weeks, months, or even years going through this nonsense with ego tripping weirdos doing hiring these days, ghost jobs, and complete psychos. I've been interviewing candidates for over 20 years and I do not say this lightly that the current process is disgusting, awful, and unacceptable at a disturbingly large number of companies.

The problem as you imply is that no one does this. Every time I've heard about, witnessed, or experienced silence, it is with a promise of contact that never comes. Browsing various job related sites and even Glassdoor (for what little it is worth), you can see many people with these exact complaints.

The problem is that people believe such promises in the first place :/... if someone builds a fully-centralized ecosystem that has a network effect benefit of any kind, it would be dumb to believe they are going to do it forever without it becoming horrible, as eventually the system will become valuable enough that the people who control it will realize a tipping point has been reached that allows them to play the good old "I have altered the deal: pray I do not alter it further" card on the user community without enough ramifications.

And yet, people fall for this over and over and over again, as the centralized system tends to be slightly easier to use or slightly cheaper (but only due to subsidies) or comes to fruition slightly faster than a decentralized protocol or even a centralized system run by a non-profit could (though the latter still failed to save us from OpenAI... ;P but like, imagine if Docker Hub were pledged to and run by the battle-hardened bureaucratic non-profit, such as the Apache Foundation, with a long track record of not extracting value from this sort of situation).

> All of this has made us seriously reconsider what we do going forwards; we obviously won't pull all our images off Docker Hub, nor is it sensible to just stop pushing new images as it will seriously impact the many users we have who pull from there...

When you hand someone else control over how to find your content -- using central registries or walled gardens, both of which always now insist on controlling the URL of your content, you've given away all of your negotiating power for when the deal is eventually altered. It should be obvious before you ever get into this situation that, one day, you will get screwed; and like, for a service where it is clearly more expensive to host it per user than anyone would ever pay for it, there is absolutely no possibility that the situation is going to continue forever without careful planning and attention to monetization.

Nothing ever has to be built this way, BTW. I developed Cydia, the alternative to the App Store used on jailbroken iOS devices, and I explicitly did not host software myself: I set up a federated ecosystem based on APT/dpkg where people had the option to self-host their software or could work with larger (ad-supported) repositories (which I refused to run), and (and this is key) there was a seamless hand-off if you later migrated between repositories and you could even be hosted by multiple at the same time. To do this, though, you have to go in being a bit humble and, explicitly, not only reject dreams that one day you'll own the ecosystem, but work every day to prevent yourself from having that kind of unilateral power in the future.

Imagine if GitHub or Facebook Pages actually worked like a Web 1.0 web hosting company (which, by and large, they are, only with single sign-on for comments/reactions and an algorithmically-sorted central feed aggregator): you would expect to be able to buy a domain name and configure a CNAME for your account, and, suddenly, the service loses much (not all!) of its power to later move on to the extraction phase... of course, services never want to do this, and users who like being "the reason why we can't have nice things" will even argue that the most minuscule of downsides such decentralized (distributed or federated or democratic or merely regulated) systems might have are unacceptable and we should go all in on the centralized ecosystem.

https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

^ A talk I gave in 2017 at Mozilla Privacy Lab on the numerous failure modes of centralized ecosystems, chock full of concrete cited examples -- every slide after the title slide, including even my "who am I?" and "any questions?" slides, is a screenshot of a news article from a reasonable source -- of the myriad situations people like to claim somehow won't ever happen --or at least wouldn't happen this time, as somehow this time is different than all the previous times-- actually happening :(. And like, if I were to do it again today, I would just have even more examples :(.

Fair point. I only know Linuxserver from various open source projects that don't offer containers on their own. I guess you mean tools like Radarr and so on. I guess it's okay to assume that someone might by offended by that.

What I specifically meant by horrendous was not only that they ignore one project. Unfortunately, I made similar experiences with my little project. They don't reply to emails, the application process is mediocre at best and the last time my projects' org got a renewal for the program, they mixed up accounts and first wanted to charge me for a team plan. Thank god someone noticed this on their side and fixed it. But all in all, a subpar experience. My expectation would be that someone at Docker takes care of this in an honest and professional manner. As of today, this seems to be not the case.

Seemed like "everyone" switched to Podman and Buildah over two years ago. Nothing screams "amateur and clueless" like still using Docker.