[usurpers]

> It almost feels like you’re a politician at times.

Because that's what he is. He's a self-chosen software politician who admits he loves his job. He's paid to travel the world and interact with his constituents.

But he is upset that his audience sometimes writes a blog post, or worse, nominally approves of adding an arbitrary number to a database associated with a blog post. Somehow this is construed as a problem with the community.

It seems the community is functioning as intended, and grievances are being hashed out. However, the author does not want to deal with the challenges of listening to and interacting with the people he is being paid to interact with.

[thejameskyle]

You assume I was being paid to work on Babel. I was not.

I worked on the UI team for Cloudflare, where we didn't even use Babel until earlier this year shortly before I left. I worked on open source on the weekend.

The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever. Conferences pay me to fly places and stay in hotels because they make a profit off of me.

Even now as I am paid to do open source. I don't think a single person on my team would expect me to tolerate people yelling at me. I'm not a politician, I can and do ignore plenty of people. Most of the time negative people arent saying anything useful anyways.

[usurpers]

> You assume I was being paid to work on Babel.

I didn't assume that. This post isn't about Babel, it's about the "JavaScript community", which you are being paid to work with.

> The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever.

I know. I'm one of them. I spend ~20 hours a week on open source on top of my full-time job. I know how stressful it can be, but I'll never complain about it because it's my choice to be involved. I'll definitely not be complaining about it if that 20 hours was something I was being materially compensated for.

> Conferences pay me to fly places and stay in hotels because they make a profit off of me.

Yes, this is how business works. Work is exchanged for tickets and advertising. Part of the work is being a presentable and knowledgeable speaker who can effectively engage and relate to the problems expressed by the audience.

> I don't think a single person on my team would expect me to tolerate people yelling at me.

If there are people harassing you that is indeed a problem -- get the police involved. That seems a completely separate issue from what's discussed in this post though, which is a community that sometimes discusses technical arguments in a way you consider abrasive.

[thejameskyle]

I wasn't saying that people don't have a right to be frustrated or angry. I wasn't saying we shouldn't voice our criticisms as developers or that we shouldn't disagree with one another.

The only argument I'm really trying to make in this article is that when someone has stepped over a line into outraged attacks on tools and authors that the community shouldn't reward them for that.

Apparently this is too much to ask because so far today I've been called:

- a special snowflake

- autistic

- whiney

- thin-skinned

- pathetic

- weak

And I only published this like 2 hours ago and I have hundreds of notifications to go through still. The next few days I'm probably going to get a hell of a lot worse. Still waiting for my first "faggot" which always inevitably happens.

I have some pretty thick skin. I was raised in an abusive environment and I made my own way in the world at 16.

I'm not bothered by one person saying I'm an idiot.

What gets to you is a few thousands people agreeing.

[sosuke]

I looked back at your story a couple of times but couldn't figure out how the outraged attacks are being rewarded. I do feel like you might be on to something in how critical comments are often the most discussed. Think about how the single like "thank you" or "thanks for that" comments are hidden as being empty of thought.

I don't have any solutions but have you seen this CGP Grey video called "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc which says that outraged ideas are the quickest to spread.

[godmodus]

Mean people Sadly come with the territory in STEM :/

The math sphere is even more brutal. It's sad fact but people in our field are less emotionally aware than others and have a low frustration threshold. It helps to fortify against that.

[woah]

Is he being paid?