Gregory's ServerThis sentiment is such a recurring sentiment for so many people who try to work in good faith with open communities. That sucks.
https://mastodon.social/@migurski/112360700602208937
 29 comments
@luis_in_brief uh yeah and the fact that people are honestly so scared to talk really honestly about this should tell us something  @luis_in_brief do I really need to dig out all the relevant material? Essentially all the friction was due to dev egos and the abuse was the other way around. @simon I can’t speak to this specific situation, but I’ll simply say that I heard almost exactly the same words from the community about the Visual Editor at Wikimedia, various browser features at Mozilla, etc. etc. @luis_in_brief definitely some questionable expectations on both sides, but the point was that cooperation with Mapbox worked well at that time. @luis_in_brief there's a larger discussion to be have around OSS and developer - customer relationships. In proprietary SW development we kept the devs behind multiple levels of support, sales and product management and employed trained people to deal with customer interaction. What could possibly go wrong when you take those barriers and filters away. @simon at WMF we had highly trained product management and trained people to deal with customer interaction. Those people often burnt out because they were constantly insulted and attacked by the community. @simon but if you want to keep proving my point by telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, go ahead! @luis_in_brief I'm not saying you are not accurately reporting what you experienced at the WMF. I'm just saying that they are what should be expected when interacting with a large number of what are essentially end customers of the WMF. And naturally the world would be a better place if it wasn't so. @migurski @luis_in_brief @brainwane if we were talking business models I would point out that you are mixing up a b2b situation with a b2c one.  @migurski @luis_in_brief you are taking a situation with interactions of what are essentially peers in the same space and saying what works there, works in a situation were the relationship and the motivation to engage are very different. Short: dev to dev vs dev to user. How many times have you interacted with the engineer that designed your washing machine? @simon @luis_in_brief I think you’re misreading the link I shared, maybe try again? @luis_in_brief Just like in any other business with larger customer bases. What do you think working on a help desk for example for your average consumer good product is like? @luis_in_brief Particularly after we just told them that they are now the new heroes and everything they say will be taken as gospel. @grimalkina drops a follow up thought that I will be thinking about for a long time https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112360789898873991  @luis_in_brief @grimalkina This is a well-known thing at this point. Openness can cost a lot; the moderation problem is not limited to FB. But we rarely equip our FOSS teams, especially the ones backed by big companies, with moderation teams and support. @Di4na @luis_in_brief open source has a culture and that culture has a problem. that goes deeper than moderation (an unsustainable job). Like if open source culture didn't hold so many hostage to a Great Man Syndrome such that even supposedly justice-aligned people tolerate massively toxic behaviors for fear of looking not techy, or not supporting the Saintly Efforts of the Appointed Few, less violence would be done to some of us who have the wrong demographics to be heard by this community. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief I do not disagree, but I also think that this is only the visible part of the iceberg. A frigton of opensource, by far the vast majority of it, is a person doing this a couple hours a month in the middle of nowhere, with a really niche skillset. And in this situation, it is not "saintly appointed few", it is whoever had enough free time and mental space and privilege and interest in a really "hobbyistic" thing that end up the few. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief and then that model is reused in vastly different situations, and we get into what you really well describes. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief like, it is not because I am scared of not being techy that i had problems going against the great man in my domain. It is because noone else than this great man had the privilege to spend time on it. Going against him would have achieved nothing. And at some point i became the part going against him and the current expected result by everyone is that the tech that seemed able to make things better will disappear. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief If we want the system to change, and I want to, we need to go deeper than "cultural". There are systemic reasons we end up in these toxic and harmful patterns. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief (and by moderation, i mostly meant being able to push out the Appointed Few) none of this is to say that such conflict is inevitable, or the default. I wouldn’t still be fighting for open communities if it was. But it is still frequent, recurrent, and brutally damaging to some of the things we claim to value most, like newcomers, non-code skill sets, and long-term investments that try to solve wicked problems. |
@luis_in_brief It does suck. People are the important and difficult part of any project (as I argue in https://liw.fi/40/). I wish I knew how to improve this in the open source / open everything movements, but, alas, I haven't a clue what to do.