Poor little guy whom took a responsibility that was above is abilities.
Dear JavaScript
141–150 of 248 posts
Re: Dear JavaScript
#142This isn't to say people shouldn't ideally be nice to each other whenever possible. I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet. Whatever it is you put out there will potentially be seen by up to 6 billion people. So "every day" you log in and see "yet another" negative comment? Grow up! There's no nice way to say that.
There's going to be negative comments on the internet please please stop complaining about it. I've been hearing people complain about negative comments on the internet for years it is not going to stop. Find another way of dealing with it.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Both provide a seemingly "free" service I'd argue that open source maintainers provide a free service. Government employees do not.
Many prominent open source projects are supported and often initiated by corporations. I imagine Google pays the core Angular team quite well.
Of course. But most of the time users are not paying the maintainers whereas with government employees you are paying them through your taxes.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#144It seems there are two things going on here. 1. Upset that people are now reacting negatively to this change as opposed to voicing criticism earlier 2. Being upset that criticism exists (2) is the sort of problem I can't help with except to say maybe grow a thicker skin or be a bit more aware of what it was you signed up for, but in regards to (1) - It's important to note that the people heavily invested in your proj…
The argument that people should grow thicker skin is part of the problem. Why do we expect people to grow thicker skin rather than expecting them to be more courteous/civil? Edit: also the argument to grow thicker skin is seemingly ignorant of scale. Sure a few criticisms should be shrugged off but should thousands, which are disparate, incoherent and likely personally insulting, be part of the thick skin department?…
Should I, in making a critical statement, be denied because someone else (or maybe several other someone elses) already have?
It seems a bit odd that if I'm a critic that my ability to exercise my freedom there is constrained by whether other people have.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#145The best way is to get a bunch of people to answer messages for you, and filter out personal insults. Also you do not need to read the news, it's possible to live under a rock and still write the best software.
If you want to talk to other like minded, conferences are nice, and also IRC, there's always nice guys lurking there and if you write something interesting they will wake up, just be patient.
Then there are community management, everything you say or write can be used against you, and there are trolls trying to make you look bad. The community can be very powerful if managed though, thousands of people can achieve a lot together.
When you make something successful, people will love you, and we all want attention, so it will be hard not to become a public figure, but you're better off not to, because there will also be haters and if you make a bad move, those fans can easily turn into an angry mob.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#146One reading of this is that people in open source JS community should be more professional, but I think you could make similar complaints about electronic communities in general. A blogger in 1999 writing about woodworking might have had similar complaints about feedback from random readers on the Internet.
If you put anything out there on the Internet and encourage people to read it/use it/whatever, you will inevitably be surprised and repulsed by how nonconstructive and uninformed some of the feedback is. Web development might be worse than other fields in this respect because there's just that many more amateur, narcissistic, toxic teenagers (in spirit at least) who don't know what they don't know diving into it, who are going to be somewhat more focused on getting cheap upvotes on Reddit with angry rants than actually creating things.
I don't know what the solution is. Some forums have higher SNRs than others, and while I often enjoy Reddit, I have no expectation that the people posting to programming subreddits are any better as a group than people who posted to Slashdot in 1999. If you do anything and tell anyone about it, some bonehead on Reddit is going to take issue with it and write an angry, uninformed, thoughtless screed about how everything is terrible and it's all your fault. You'll find some gems in places like Reddit as well, but it's just such a random stew of people that you have to take it all with a huge grain of salt.
I agree with just about everything in the article, but given the number of Reddit quotes used as examples, part of the author's problem is taking Reddit too seriously or assuming that a given community on Reddit is a reflection of a larger programming community, whereas often the opposite is true. Oftentimes the people that post the most have the least to say, on Reddit (and the Internet in general), as in life.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest. As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.
> As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology. If a lot of people are so negative about it, is it worth even considering whether they might be correct? Is it not ideological to refuse to do so?
You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers"? Would you like to elaborate on that?
It's not surprising that many find it offensive when people don't bother to differentiate between newbie programmers who have just learned the basics of jQuery and experienced front-end developers capable of building complex, well-architected applications.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but he's specifically calling out communities that reward negative behavior rather than calling it out. I mean, are you being serious right now? There's a difference between "boo hoo everyone's so mean :'((" and "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", and that's pretty explicitly the point of the article.
James Kyle wrote: >There’s a lot of these “sub-communities”, places like /r/javascript and Hacker News that often reward negativity more than positivity. and you write: "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", Ok... so exactly how do we address it? Do we repeat, "From now on, let's all be nicer with more positive energy and feedback!" Ok, now that we've done that, is the problem solved? Why no…
There are nice communities out there. It seems more naive to me to think that we might as well just throw our hands up in the air than to think that we can identify ways to move ourselves forward.
You've also shifted your criticism here to "Ok, but how?" from the original criticism that sounded like "Well, humans suck. Boo hoo."
So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be optimistic about growing and developing ourselves and our communities into better people.
Here's another: as I am about to do, we can pinpoint unhelpful claims that hold us back from improvement rather than moving us forward. Your comments so far have largely been the former, in that they treat the people the article's author criticises as though they couldn't behave any differently. One key step is adopting the belief that people, including the people who have been really nasty so far, can in fact choose to behave differently.
Here's another: We can be vocal about the importance of maintainers standing up for respectful communication within their communities. We can create and spread resources that help empower people to do this. We can institutionalize roles such as "community maintainer" whose job revolves less around code and more around discourse.
These are coming off the top of my head. So on that note, here's another: we can encourage people to do one more thing before posting a comment or article – check in about whether what they're saying is truly constructive, and redirect their efforts if not. I'm sure you could have come up with some of these approaches, and I'm sure you could come up with more that I haven't thought of. But you need to push yourself to try. You need to push yourself to get better. And the rest of us need to be here to help you and each other and everyone else do just that.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's some cultural and some technical elitism here, and you can taste it. It's available on other forums, but I think it's a touch stronger here. On the other hand, HN does a great job of shouting down trolls and truly ignorant (unresearched/uninformed) opinions. As such, I find a stronger S/N here despite the elitism. It's pretty easy to filter/calibrate for that than the trolling and sheer idiocy so pervasive in…
As such, I find a stronger S/N here despite the elitism. Despite? I've only been on the internet for 15 years, but I thought elitism was the only way to increase s/n ratio. I've seen elitism enforced through selecting _who_ can talk or _how_ the people talk to eachother. But I've never seen anything but "GOML" change interaction for the better. Even this "Dear Javascript" can be seen as a flavor of GOML.
Nosir, I often consider elitism part of the noise. It's just a particularly filterable part of the usual array of noise sources, though. And I recognize this is a subjective statement; YMMV.
Re: Dear JavaScript
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
James Kyle wrote: >There’s a lot of these “sub-communities”, places like /r/javascript and Hacker News that often reward negativity more than positivity. and you write: "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", Ok... so exactly how do we address it? Do we repeat, "From now on, let's all be nicer with more positive energy and feedback!" Ok, now that we've done that, is the problem solved? Why no…
There are nice communities out there. It seems more naive to me to think that we might as well just throw our hands up in the air than to think that we can identify ways to move ourselves forward. You've also shifted your criticism here to "Ok, but how?" from the original criticism that sounded like "Well, humans suck. Boo hoo." So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be opti…
>You've also shifted your criticism here to "Ok, but how?" from the original criticism that sounded like "Well, humans suck. Boo hoo."
It's not shifting positions. My 1st post was general commentary on JK's post. My 2nd post was asking Mouq to clarify his "solution" since he didn't actually state a concrete solution.
>So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be optimistic
Yes, did you notice that I already made that suggestion in my post that you replied to and you just repeated it?