[striking]

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 to be compatible. This made people angry. I believe they might still be. And I don't see a point like that addressed in the story.

I don't have an answer for you on how to fix this. There are many people that consider the A2 switch to have been necessary, so "don't do stuff like that" isn't necessarily even an answer.

But my point stands. People get angry, for better or for worse. Logically or irrationally. You can't just "call out" that behavior and expect it to get better. You need to better understand and empathize with those people, and work with them.

I don't believe this piece is helpful. I think it paints with too widely a brush and ignores the legitimate criticisms that the community is making.

[dandelany]

Honestly I feel that most FOSS projects would lose very very little if the most vocal complainers somehow vanished overnight. The angriest users are the ones that understand the least and contribute the least. Of course there are legitimate issues with nearly every FOSS project, and civil people complaining about them legitimately, and we should work to address them. But we should not be pandering to the most petulant and angry users in our communities - as the article says, this simply rewards bad behavior. I would be happy to see those members largely ignored in favor of better communication with the more levelheaded and rational users in the community.

[striking]

Well, that's fair. If someone steps majorly out of line, time them out or ban them. I'm not saying you should pander, I'm saying you should empathize. (Within reason.)

That being said, exclusion is a very powerful tool, one best used with caution. It's easy to mistake temporary anger for constant trolling. It's very easy to ban someone who falls into that sort of gray area.

[dandelany]

Just to clarify - I'm not suggesting we make liberal use of the banhammer for anyone who steps out of line - there are other ways of changing behavior that will work better. Just considering the hypothetical where they don't exist :)

[hankmccoy78]

Sure, people trying to use libraries and frameworks to make their living absolutely get frustrated for often legitimate reasons. But we're supposed to be professionals and as such we should have the self-control, skill, and empathy to channel our frustration into productive feedback instead of just venting our anger like an out-of-control toddler.

[ry_ry]

I suspect the professionalism aspect is a salient point - given the accessibility the platform offers, whilst many of githubs users are professional developers doing their day job, they might equally be somebody trying to build a webpage for their cat, who stumbled across the repo looking for a troubleshooting guide.

With platforms like github, it's difficult to attribute the degree of merit any given comment deserves, so we kinda have to take them all at face value. That can be pretty brutal at times.