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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Whatever drawbacks Actix may have had, this entitlement has gone too far. There is no defensible reason to tell someone "never write Rust again" because you don't like the code they're making available to you. We need something to remind us that we should be civil and grateful for FOSS contributions.

I recently saw a talk by Atwood about good discourse and how you should remind people of your values before they write their comment, which I think applies here. I'm going to make a single-page website reminding people that FOSS maintainers are volunteers performing a service to everyone else, and that we should keep that in mind.

If nothing else, it'll be an easy think to link people to in my issues sometimes.

EDIT: It's going to go up on https://www.osscoc.com/

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"We need something to remind us that we should be civil and grateful for FOSS contributions."

You mean like having the legitimate risk that maintainers will take their ball and go home when people are cruel and others stand around and let it happen?

This is everyone's fault who didn't dogpile the people who were being terrible. We all need to be calling out people being horrible, and provide a little emotional support to maintainers. We worry too much about the feelings of people who contribute nothing, and not enough about the people who build the things upon which we rely.

No, I mean something less remote and which looks less like a random act of God, something that people can read before engaging in discussion and not easily dismiss because "it probably won't happen". We need to raise the level of discourse across the board, not just prevent the most egregious of negativity.

I want people to enter the discussion with the mindset "this is a volunteer effort so I will aim to be productive in my disagreement", rather than "fuck this guy".

Ahh, yes. That would be fantastic.

> "This is everyone's fault who didn't dogpile the people who were being terrible."

That presumes that "dogpiling" would actually stop the behavior, rather than getting people to dig in their heels and further inflame tempers.

Even so, it can serve two purposes: the author feels defended and acknowledged and the author feels relieved as the heat is, at least temporarily, directed at someone else. And this is the worst case scenario.

The author feels defended, but the subject of the dogpiling feels attacked. Maybe that leads to deescalation, but that's far from a foregone conclusion. Bullying bullies often further normalizes the act of bullying in the eyes of the bullied bully, as well as potentially normalizing bullying in the eyes of observers.

There are better ways to handle situations like this.

> how you should remind people of your values before they write their comment

That sort of thing doesn't work, even if it's shoved in people's faces. The only viable solution I've ever seen for enforcing community standards is to suspend or ban people who violate them. Otherwise, you'll always have trolls and people who want to see you fail looking to poison the well.

> We need something to remind us that we should be civil and grateful for FOSS contributions.

Sort of ironic that the entire commotion started when the Actix maintainer dismissed a contributor's code as boring after they wrote a POC and a patch for a use-after-free bug.

>I recently saw a talk by Atwood ...

Interesting, if you could share a link or some other source me and my dinner would appreciate it :)

I'm rather sure it was this one:

https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/civilized-discourse-b...

Thank you!

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