[Avamander]

I'm not talking strictly about death threats, calling him random slurs already is too much and has happened on HN, this "loose set of people" should not, and it'd already probably change his opinion about different communities. Lennart should absolutely sometimes choose his words, like Linus, but I don't think we should be excusing insults with saying "it's unenforceable" when most places haven't really tried to remain civil due to personal beliefs.

[liability]

What do you expect "the community" to do, downvote anybody who speaks harshly about him? That won't stop it, and even if it did it still wouldn't stop 4channers with anime avatars on github from trolling him constantly. There is no community solution to Lennart getting his feelings hurt. That's not an excuse, it's a cold truth.

[Avamander]

> downvote anybody who speaks harshly about him?

Who said "harshly", downvote anyone who insults randomly, yes.

> That won't stop it, and even if it did it still wouldn't stop 4channers with anime avatars on github from trolling him constantly.

So if 4chan doesn't stay civil then we shouldn't try to remain civil?

> There is no community solution to Lennart getting his feelings hurt.

But the community can be half of the solution, noone said it has to be a 100% one.

[liability]

There is little in this thread which even gets close to approaching incivil. And every time the systemd guys talk about online abuse, they always mention the worst of it, the death threats and other abuse from 4chan. Even if HN outright banned anything other than glowing praise of SystemD, that would not make a difference.

I'll reiterate: the notion of 'community' in this discussion is borderline meaningless and any attempt to govern it will fail for exactly that reason, and therefore any solution to the problem of SystemD developers feeling besieged that is predicated on governing the 'community' is, frankly, worthless.