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Are the motivations of maintainers aligned with the developers using their software?
I strongly suspect that the competitive environment in Javascript frameworks and :s/tool/fool/ing is the main source of the negativity: Trolls have the explicit agenda to demolish/demotivate what they're trolling in order to push their own project/framework.
I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind. Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much m…
Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew). Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.
Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN.
I think HN comment posters are generally innocent. I would guess that the storm came from elsewhere, or from particularly unscrupulous people who happen to read HN. Stuff like the mentioned subject ends up bringing out the paranoid people, which often causes some seriously unhinged commentary.
This sort of thing isn't unique to software. The same human behaviors that first-line tech support has to deal with on a daily basis are driving this; it's especially bad in F/OSS because it's often the case that the developers and the supporters are the same people.
I strongly suspect that the competitive environment in Javascript frameworks and :s/tool/fool/ing is the main source of the negativity: Trolls have the explicit agenda to demolish/demotivate what they're trolling in order to push their own project/framework.
This is a really shitty thing to say, which you clearly understand. The 90/9/1 comes in to play here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) I have found that even sites like HN don't skew significantly far from this. As users, we can't know who the 90% of people are who read this site and never post. But there are definitely 9 times more people commenting than creating. As an open source project…
Some time ago I discovered a major XSS security vulnerability in a very popular WordPress plugin (used on over 100,000 blogs). I notified the author and got it fixed, and published a blog post about the issue 12 months later. The article itself was entirely factual and described the nature of the issue, how I discovered it and what the fix was. Unfortunately, the author took this as a personal attack (the email he sent me made that clear) and I decided to take the post down.
The thing is, I had actually spend many hours going through every single line of code to look for other security vulnerabilities. Sure, I hadn't written any code, and I wasn't the maintainer, but it was still an "open source contribution" in some sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Of course it's worth it: we've considered it, and we think you're wrong.
edit: also, "ideological" is unfair. We know JS isn't godlike. We use it regardless.
Earlier 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.
See, but this doesn't address those community issues. It doesn't talk about the changes that these devs will have to make to keep up with the times. I don't have anything to say for Babel, as I'm not a user of it. But I remember the anger of the Angular community as Angular 2 was announced. No one could believe that they would eventually choose to leave behind Angular 1, that they'd have to nearly rewrite their apps…
It 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?…
Dear James, I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually. However, I am one of those people who think that…