> So, Reactgate has become a thing. What's been fomenting for a while blew up last week, with two prominent White Men In Tech having little tantrum Twitter breaks, and a wonderful woman of colour working as a dev/designer feeling she is no longer welcome in our industry and planning to leave as soon as it's financially possible.
God. Its so creepy casually stereotyping people by their race and gender in this manner.
Ironically it’s always from so called social justice moralists.
It reminds me of the Stephen fry quote about the church and sex.
> It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult.
It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.
These blog authors seem to have an analogous obsession with gender and race.
While I agree with you that it's problematic, a minority woman stereotyping a white man is not quite the same as in reverse if you see relative social positioning as a first class factor. The reasoning for why it's different is something like the reasoning for why it's generally fine for employees to get together and casually bond over being annoyed by their bosses but the same thing going the other way would be obviously inappropriate. A lot of people experience being of minority race, gender, and culture as constructs that basically equate to having been born holding the short end of an implicit employee-boss relationship. As such, it's something that's naturally at the forefront of their minds.
I don't understand anything at all. It seems some dev used an OK HAND emoji in some slides during some talk, and it was misinterpreted as the White Supremacist symbol or whatever.
Someone felt attacked personally, criticized it on Twitter and now everything is going downhill...
It seems online culture is so plastic that we can quickly see a move from irony/trolling to sincere usage. How is a person not at the fronts of where hateful groups and their opponents meet supposed to navigate a battlefield of memes and conventions that see distinct transitions in cultural symbols (like a phase change almost) from benign to harmful within weeks?
I think people with such obsessions, bringing their baggage of politics everywhere should be thrown out of tech communities discussing tech. They can form whatever meta-community they like for that.
I have seen absolutely zero ..."white supremacism" in React community leaders, and the whole idea is too bizarro to begin with.
If someone is both a white supremacist and a React developer (which I find implausible, but ok) that's bad, but it's not like it's any sizable part of React devs, or characterizes the tone of the community, or affects anything or whatever...
Yeah it’s just a ridiculous situation. I had to unfollow all React related things on Twitter the moment I saw people lambasting Dan Abramov as “selfish” for disabling his Twitter for the sake of his sanity. It’s one thing to promote diversity, it’s another to create massive problems for the innocent over nothing.. especially the innocent that have been nothing _but_ genuinely supportive of your cause.
It seems that the cancel-cult left has really taken hold, at least in the loud places on social media.
Quite some years ago I think that symbol was used among youngsters so that if you looked at the hand making the OK symbol people would make laugh of you. Not because of some white supremacism ideology, but because of young people's stupid jokes. Politics were not involved as far as I know.
Basically, a symbol for you to look at and the other person saying "Hah, you're an idiot!".
It seems like the well known React developer has a somewhat more ... illustrous ... history of questionable behavior, so while he may not be an actually white supremacist, he does seem to fit a certain toxic mold.
On the other hand, the mentioned female developer has probably had quite a lot of such experiences with direct and indirect racism, perceived or actual, but either she kept quiet or it didn't blow up that much.
I see! I didn’t know this was the case in the US. I’ve checked my English dictionary and it says:
>guys: Informal Persons of either sex.
I guess it’s one of those differences between British and American English. Good to know, because it seems like one could easily get in trouble for using it incorrectly (in the British sense) in the US!
Serious, not intended to flame bait question: Why is race/gender featured so prominently in this technical post?
Would it be appropriate to open a post with “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown”?
I was wondering that as well. However I am not sure I would call it a technical post. To me it reads more like the rant of a person who hates react because it was written by facebook.
Another issue is that there is a much more serious and extensive history of value judgements about "black" people, rather than about "white" people.
At least in the US there never was widespread slavery of white people because they are white, or widespread ideas of white skin color being associated with lesser intelligence, culture or whatever.
It is, however, very important not to get hung up in racist terminology. For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or who is actually white, or how much of each.
It's not like the average heckler on the street asks somebody where he is from, his religion, what he is doing for a living or what his ancestral gene mixture is!
The nature of progress is movement relative to the position currently being held. I bet you're right that a lot of people are just thoughtlessly bandwagoning, but I bet the blanket dismissal of progressive attitudes also misses a lot of people who are thoughtfully deciding where to go from here.
My point though was not about the progressive attitudes, as much as about the ridiculous excess ("guys" being offensive, etc). In a decade or so these would be viewed the same way most people viewed hippies after the 70s...
One difference is that "black men in tech" are a minority with a lot of discriminatory experiences. Criticizing a minority you don't belong to for complaining too much is something different than criticizing the majority you do belong to for the same thing.
I don't know about "react-gate" yet, but I'm sure to find out in a few minutes.
Because for some, race/gender is a primary factor in how they experience being a developer. I believe that is the fundamental point the article is making -- that the reasons why React is what it is today are not necessarily objective and totally sound but rather significantly influenced by what ideas and interests were already in the population at the cost of other ideas that may require more of a leap from the mainstream to fully understand but may also be better overall.
It would not be appropriate to post with the title “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown” but it is at least this okay with white dudes for the same reason why it's fine to make fun of The Mountain if he can't hit a squat in the gym but it's not fine to make fun of your buddy who's trying to make a change in his life. Of course how much better The Mountain is than your buddy at lifting heavy stuff is probably a larger discrepancy than the gap between white men and and minority women's abilities to affect the course of the developer landscape but that's the mechanism.
Just like this whole drama, this attitude (I don’t like my gender and race being the focus of things, therefore I’m going to do it to you) seems counter-productive to the cause of inclusion and diversity.
> Mobile devices simply don't have the CPU and memory to cope well with client-side JS apps.
I think they do, but most client-side JS apps are horribly designed. They load the whole bundle at once, display ads, have setTimeouts and other unnecessary things that add to the bloat.
Native apps aren't great either, I hate the Twitter and Reddit ones, they constantly fail to load stuff, block and restart.
It depends. If I'm never planning on visiting the "live dashboard" of some website then all the extra code that is loaded for that feature is useless to me. That's why separate bundles exists (with browserify, webpack etc).
What is this madness? Is this a tech article? Is this what good content looks like on the internet? Is React racist? Do people simply spend too much time on twitter?
I have so many questions and hope to never have to answer any of them.
This is not a tech article and shouldn't be listed. I read the summary of twitter remarks and am constantly amazed by how sensitive people appear to be.
... I should have left it alone as soon as I saw the comments about capitalism being shit and intersectionalism being a real thing.
I thought it offered some valid technical criticisms of React: specifically that it's over engineered and it results in a bad user experience, especially on mobile.
I thought the article offered an interesting argument that front end development has suffered from increasing over-engineering in the last decade, and this over-engineering can be explained by cultural factors and the influence of large corporations like Facebook.
> In classic fashion, the most privileged 1% of developers (as in those with the most free time - young, white, able-bodied men) saw the newly released React and fell over themselves to be in on The Latest Interesting Technology.
I am a brown guy in a 3rd world country who has been using react for long enough to be an early adopter. Reading this suddenly transformed me into a 6.6ft, white skinned, blue eyed Aryan wet dream.
> The concept of "We Live In A Meritocracy" becomes firmly implanted in the community.
> We reach today, where two prominent React community leaders quit Twitter rather than deal with accusations of emerging white nationalism and machismo-fueled poor behavior.
> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles (validation through work, market dominance, a continuous supply of skilled Labor) that result in Things being placed before People.
This is next level satire, right? right? Or at least something generated by an AI bot fuelled by China/Russia/Ghost of USSR. And the comments below the article take the cake. I have seen better comments on threads in /b/
Being brown in a white place is a different experience than being brown in a brown place. There is a lot of friction when different enough groups coexist. If you've ever found yourself in maybe a job or something where you thought differently enough from the people around you to feel like they were more interested in just maintaining their bubble of how they understand the world than discovering the best way to be, it's that same mechanism in action. Just it's blown up to much larger proportions since it's not just you differing with people who share your race, culture, ideas about how society should function, etc.
I still think React is a wonderful library and feels like a more natural way to express a dynamic web page. Other frameworks get into your face a lot more.
It does seem like a lot of the grievances in this post are about arbitrary choices by the author or the teams using React as part of their stack.
Maybe I'm not attached enough to React that I can understand the problem.
The last two projects I worked on that used React, it was pretty obvious that there it served no purpose other than to make webdev into “hard” software engineering. Even the tiniest design changes required expensive software devs to implement them. Good for me but it cost the client a fortune.
Although there are lots of cases where React is overused, for example in mostly-static pages that don't really benefit from automated state bindings, there are situations when React is nice. I just recently came back to Android development scene, and React Native actually makes it super easy to do simple Android dev. While it couldn't be used in all use-cases, for prototyping and getting simple things done quickly, it seems like a pretty promising technology.
> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles
God. Its so creepy casually stereotyping people by their race and gender in this manner.
Ironically it’s always from so called social justice moralists.
It reminds me of the Stephen fry quote about the church and sex.
> It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.
These blog authors seem to have an analogous obsession with gender and race.