[jasode]

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 not?

You see, negativity in complaints about others' work is universal. Before the internet, scientists had been slinging mud at other scientists' work in prestigious journals. During the heydays of Usenet we had nasty Lisp debates. And now, we have have rants about Babel6 and Angular2 that's a killjoy for the maintaners. As Captain Louis Renault would say, "I'm shocked gambling is going on in here!"

On a related note... I recently read about autism and a book discussed some of the debates of parents caring for an autistic child. You'd think that an environment like that would foster the ultimate empathy and positive feedback (compared to Javascript projects) ... but no.... some parents are quite mean-spirited in criticism of other parents' therapy methods. To think we can somehow "solve" the problem of Javascript programmers' negativity about OSS projects seems naive.

[FussyZeus]

The Appeal to Tradition fallacy, because things have always been shitty and improvement is hard.

Just because people have always been jerks doesn't mean we have to be forever. The idea of inclusion, bringing in more brains in more people to accomplish the same goal is a universal gain for everyone involved, including the people who get angry about it.

You can minimize the effects of a toxic culture that rewards people for being rude, you can even file it under "meritocracy" which has never existed anywhere in human history, you can do anything else to justify why you have the right to be a jerk and no one can stop you and as a maintainer that's fine, you have that right. But in doing so you push out valuable developer resources, new people, and fresh ideas which only hurts the thing you're trying to build or use.

Anyone can get angry. Anyone can take to a keyboard and spill a row of profanity and impotent rage because it makes them feel better for a short moment. It takes real scholars to get out there and actually solve the problems, and I'm sorry but no problems have ever been solved by techbros highfiving each others blog posts.

[GavinMcG]

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.

[jasode]

>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?

[magicalist]

> > 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?

Hmm, let's see...

> 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 not?

yeah, no, that's not the same thing at all.

[jasode]

>, no, that's not the same thing at all.

Are you being literal? I wasn't saying that "repeated" meant lexical equality:

  string.compare("more positive", "optimistic") == TRUE

Instead, I meant this:

  semantic_intent("more positive", "optimistic") == TRUE

It's naive to think GavinMcG's "solution" of disapproving others negativity hasn't already been done thousands of times before across other disciplines and other forums including Linux/Lisp/C++/PHP/physics/autism/etc. Yes, nice communities do exist (often because of heavy-handed moderation/censorship) but that's orthogonal to the inevitable formation of other uncensored communities that freely share negative criticisms. Therefore, the reasons that motivated JK's original post will always exist.

[GavinMcG]

Another big difference is that I'm not advocating for us to "repeat" that we should all be positive. It's not about public proclamation – it's about addressing individuals and their individual acts. That's what the communal discourse is made up of. Like you're saying, simply shouting "let's be nice" obviously doesn't work.

I'll add another thing to my list of suggestions: be really deliberate about educating people on the principle of charity. Instead of assuming that the other person is dumb/shortsighted/etc., assume that you're not giving their thinking enough credit.

> that's orthogonal to the inevitable formation of other communities

So what? Drive the downers out of JS-land, or whatever community you care about. You had been saying that even that shouldn't be bothered with. But if it can be accomplished, who cares if they all go off to learn Brainfuck, if that's the only community that will accept their behavior?

[jasode]

>Drive the downers out of JS-land,

This is not possible.

When you previously mentioned "nice communities", I thought that meant specific javascript forums. Now I see you meant to drive the undesirables out of entire Javascript language completely and force them into another language.

>You had been saying that even that shouldn't be bothered with.

I've never said this. I've never suggested that people shouldn't strive to have well-behaved communities that encourages constructive feedback. In the forums I moderated, negative rant posts were not allowed and deleted.

However, I see the confusion in interpreting my posts now. You and Mouq are focused on the "making a better world" angle. My posts were describing something else: the build up of anger about <topic> will always exist to frustrate people like JK regardless of the efforts to make a friendlier community. (E.g. see multi-decades history of discourse about C++/Java/Lisp/etc/etc)

[kazinator]

"JS-land" spans every web browser on the planet.

JavaScript isn't some open source little language with a little community; it's what everyone has to use to target a web browser, whether they like it or not.

Nobody has to like JavaScript or be in some unofficial JavaScript community in order to develop in JavaScript.

[Mouq]

Moderation and social dynamics are things that have to be built from smaller scales outward. Yes, there will always be people writing articles about "This project is awful and the developers are bad people," but it's also possible to have platforms and communities that don't indulge in and enable that kind of pettiness.

And it's true that driving those people away will likely cause them to form their own communities, but so be it. More often what happens, actually, is that the people less interested in unneeded hostility (like I said about building from smaller scales) will splinter and form their own communities. If these communities are effective, however, they'll often slowly be recognized by the nasties in the original community and be invaded by the same or similar people. The real problem is figuring out how to deal with them and maintain solidarity without compromising social ideals, rather than just splintering again.

Also, I'm not real knowledgeable about issues surrounding autism, but I do know that autistic kids are a primary target of parental abuse, often by parents who may appear well-meaning from the outside... so I wouldn't be surprised if those can be quite toxic communities, especially if we're talking about parents and not autistic people themselves at the forefront of discourse. But perhaps I'm just cynical.