[sadfaceunread]

Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

[jrochkind1]

I disagree. Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others. Environments where emotionally aggressive communications are the norm have a whole lot to do with gender roles in our society. And how someone deals with such an environment is effected by their gender socialization too, such environments are perceived and dealt with differently, as a generalized trend, by women and men. (yes, individual men and women can be on both ends of it, at different times).

[barsonme]

> Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to others.

My parents sure didn't raise me that way. Honestly, a large reason why so many people are aggressive when they communicate is simply because they just don't know how to communicate. It's not a male thing, nor is it a female thing.

It's a "I'm unable to express my unhappiness regarding this scenario in a well-thought out and respectful way, so I'm going to lob some insults at you to make my point" thing.

My dad used to say that if you need to swear then you've obviously lost the ability to express your opinion in an articulate, and polite way. I don't 100% agree with that statement, but it does have some truth to it when you apply it a bit differently.

If you can't tell somebody their code is bad without berating them for even being born it's not because you're a man or a woman, you either have a condition which prevents you from recognizing you're being a dick or you do not know how to communicate like a civilized human.

Being assertive, constructive, and listening well are three ways to be able to communicate like a decent person. Being subservient or aggressive, destructive, and failing to listen are three/four ways to communicate like a person with a lack of social skills.