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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

#GatersGonnaGate

On a more serious tone: this level of "I'm offended by []" is actually becoming counter productive. It's pushing talented, good people, with controversial lifestyle/opinion out of open source, out of the very thing that, in theory, should welcome contributions from anyone as long as it's technically sound and clear. (Related read I found this morning: https://mikkel.hoegh.org/2017/04/18/why-i-care-about-drupal-... )

Can we please go back to the nobody knows you're a dog times with pseudonyms and everything?

EDIT: "nobody knows you're a dog" requires the one behind the pseudonym to stay faceless and the community accept that anyone can be behind a pseudonym and approach the contribution/work/etc without assumptions. It's hard. It's never been properly done, but maybe it's time for this.

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> It's pushing talented, good people, with controversial lifestyle/opinion out of open source, out of the very thing that, in theory, should welcome contributions from anyone as long as it's technically sound and clear.

What if the people who are being pushed out have been pushing other people out this whole time? People complain a lot about losing talented/high-profile developers because they made parts of the community uncomfortable, but then seem to ignore/minimize the way that person was driving other talented people--often from underrepresented/marginalized groups--away.

It may have been when these scandals started many moons ago and there are always exceptions to anything, but from what I've been reading for the past ~2 years, this is not the case any more.

People being pushed out are, in many if not most cases those who have a personal life, with personal view on life, which other can't accept, despite the fact that those views and their work are usually well separated from each other.

I don’t think they write articles/scandals on the huge amount of harassment people receive just for being a woman on the internet, or black on the internet. The reality is that (1) everyone gets harassed online (2) black people get harassed more than white people (3) women get harassed much much more than men. If all you’re reading is articles about “gates” then of course it seems like there is an assault on a specific type of person, but you need to adjust your priors to understand that many women receive that volume of abuse much more frequently and no one is writing articles on it. There might be acute attacks on individuals in scandals, but there is a constant mid to high level harassment on some individuals.

I've not challenged or questioned your points. The scandals, CoC, []Gate, on the other hand, doesn't really seems to be working, because they keep popping up. Hence the thought of pseudonyms.

I am not sure on your reasoning here. If they keep popping up, isn't that a good thing? More and more communities are seeing the internal problems these people are causing and are calling them out on it. I've never seen "ReactGate 2.0 cause the 1.0 people are still causing issues". I can't say every "gate" has fixed all their problems but acknowledging the issues and working towards a fix is a step in the right direction.

Is there any part of tech which succeeded and is now a blossoming haven of diversity? I mean, with so many people getting pushed out from everywhere else it should be easy to fill your rank with top talent, no? Given that we have a few million programmers in USA, you'd expect it to be a simple task to get a few thousand of these harassed people together to start something big.

I know there are a few projects with ~100 people, but I am not aware of anything larger than that which is not what we would expect. So the measures we apply today like CoC's seems to have no effect on how welcoming the industry feels to marginalized people.

> What if the people who are being pushed out have been pushing other people out this whole time?

So who decides when and where someone may be "pushed out?"

If you're going to war to push out someone, you may well end up pushing out more than just that one person. You become the thing you sought to defeat.

So who is "right?"

That’s exactly what the COC is for. The community adopts rules and abides by them, break the rules and you’re out.

What if I'm offended and feel put-off by malcontents playing lawyer-ball? Should I start screaming bigot until they capitulate to my will?

I have no problem with reprimanding people that say caustic things about people while communicating in some project-specific forum. I personally draw the line at Linus' conduct in the past- he may have attacked people, but at least it was always entirely because of their code.

However, people have started policing other, non-project forums as well. That, I do not abide. Just because the person that submitted that PR was an absolute racist bigot on twitter a decade ago (or even last night), it has no bearing on the quality of their code. As long as it stays out of their code and their PR.

>As long as it stays out of their code and their PR.

That assumes that the only important thing about the ecosystem of a project is the code. The code is only going to be useful as long as there are people to continue building and maintaining it. I don't know about you, but I have a difficult time working with racists, regardless of the quality of their code. I'm not willing to overlook something like that just to get some code written.

There are more important things than code.

> I have a difficult time working with racists

Racists is such an overloaded term that this means basically nothing. It could mean that you refuse to work with people who burn crosses in black people's yards in which case basically everyone would agree with you, but it could mean that you refuse to work with people who made an ok-sign once without knowing that it had been adopted by white supremacists in which case most people would think you are ridiculous.

When people say that we should leave politics outside of it they mean the second kind.

In more remote open source projects some people advocate for the "everyone is anonymous" variant, in which case they think that nothing matters if the technical parts are good since they wont even know what they do outside of the project. But afaik not a lot of people argue for that in a normal workplace or for conferences.

What exactly does 'politics' mean in this case? Any concerns that aren't related to code? Can you define it in simple terms that leaves no gray areas?

Completely anonymous systems leads to abuse. This has been demonstrated over and over again.

The most insidious kinds of racism do not involve burning crosses. Obviously just flashing the ok-sign doesn't make you a racist. But society has clearly demonstrated that we are perfectly willing to tolerate the more subtle instances of racism for many reasons. In an environment like that, it's no surprise that the targets of that behavior become incredibly suspicious and distrusting.

The way to solve that problem is not to "leave politics out of it" or to complain that they are too sensitive. The way to solve that problem is to address the underlying problem.

I find people who assume men are prone to violence to be sexists. I also find people who dismisses struggles because someones skin is white and thus assumed "privileged" to be racists. I would prefer to not have to work with people who express such views but I can live with it if people just keep politics out of work and professional settings.

Trying to address the underlying problem of why people has such views is a complex proposition and involves deep discussions based on evidence from neuroendocrinology, primatology, sociology, gender roles, social stratification, historical causes regarding each, and so on. It might very well be impossible if people are not open minded to the idea in the first place.

>I don't know about you, but I have a difficult time working with racists, regardless of the quality of their code.

Why? I'm genuinely curious here. Tangentially, I'm wondering about:

Would you watch a movie made by a racist?

Would you watch a movie starring a racist?

Would you watch a movie where the Key Grip was a racist?

Would you eat a sandwich prepared by a racist?

Would you eat a cucumber grown by a racist?

Would you read a book written by a racist?

Would you read a book edited by a racist?

Would you engage in civil discourse with a racist?

I'm reminded of Steve Irwin. When asked if he minded taking money from unsavory people, he replied he'd take money from any source at all and use it to buy land to conserve it. I view code as the same way- that person is devoting time, a portion of their life, to freely write code for the betterment of all. That is not a free pass to treat people poorly; but if you dig hard enough in anybody's past, you'll probably find something to get upset about. I just think people shouldn't go looking for trouble.

Yes, it does get complicated. I love music, including the music of Wagner, who was an extremely shitty person on top of antisemitism. Once I learned about that, I re-examined my opinion of him, and my appreciation of his music changed, but did not disappear.

Part of the problem is that the world itself is incredibly complicated, and behaving ethically gets correspondingly complicated because of it (highlighted most excellently in The Good Place).

If you notice, I didn't set a hard rule. I just said, I have a difficult time working with racists. I don't believe that you can set hard rules for any of these things. which leads to another part of the problem: People want simple rules for how they should act, and things that will absolve them of being completely responsible for their actions. These things do not exist, and will never exist.

Everyone is always going to disagree about where the line should be drawn. As a society, we're terrible at managing those differences. We let our egos get in the way too often.

I believe I am not racist, but I still recognize that I can do things that will feel racist to others. In fact, I have done racist things in the past unintentionally. When I was called out on it, instead of letting my ego respond, I listened, and because of that, I became a better person.

If your intention is to be a kind person, then I've found that there generally isn't a problem in handling these things. If your intention is to be able to do what you want without consequences, or to protect your ego, then you're going to have problems.

What if the people who are being pushed out have been pushing other people out this whole time?

Is there any actual evidence that ever happens? Citation very much needed.

Can you really say that about Dan Abramov and Ken Wheeler though? Some of the nicest and most inclusive people in the community. I've seen them both engage people all at different points in their career and be encouraging and positive. They are allies in this case but they are being turned into enemies for no reason. This reminds me a lot of BLM verbally attacking Sanders when he was the only person in their corner at the time.

Anonymity also avoids unproductive and abusive viewpoint and history shaming.

What political party I belong to (or don't), or what position I hold on a controversial issue will almost never have any bearing on how well I can accomplish a programming task.

Of course, collaboration is not just a series of programming tasks.

The problem isn’t pseudonyms, it’s assholes. People have worse behavior with pseudonymous accounts. Part of the problem with open source, or any large project or group, is that toxic personalities can “poison” the project and reduce overall output even if the toxic person is high performing.

It's not a simple as that. Good open source collaboration often requires team work. Peoples' beliefs manifest in how they interact with other people. The code of conduct moderate that interaction.

It's not uncommon to see arguments that start in disagreement around technical details escalate into full blown ad hominem attacks.

This happened also in the olden days (linux kernel dev comes to mind), and it was never ok.

It’s difficult to parlay work done under a pseudonym into a paying gig. Personal branding becomes particularly difficult as getting paid becomes two steps short of a money laundering operation.

pseudonym != anonymity

It's like a stage name, a face, a persona, for a specific purpose. Under that persona one should keep focused on the topic, within the guidelines, etc. but outside they could be their own person.

Simple example: if the current trend continues, soon listening to certain music will become a problem. If someone listens to nordic black metal in their free time, outside of work communities, including online ones, so be it, because it has nothing to do with work communities.

This would require communities to respect and realize the need for this.

soon listening to certain music will become a problem

Most rap is violently misogynistic and homophobic, that’s another example. I don’t know if anyone was ever ostracised from a tech conference for listening to Eminem though.

Pseudonyms should be allowed if that's what people want for themselves, but that doesn't solve the problem of people who want to use their real identity but might be targeted for harassment as a result.

Pseudonymity by expectation is akin to requiring everyone to be "in the closet", even if they feel it's important for them not to be.

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