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Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this perspective, in theory. Not liking how something is implemented is different than suggesting it isn't implemented. The real damning aspect of this is that criticism surrounding these decisions seems to result in the silencing of the critic. There are times where moderation and banning are necessary, such as when the critic resorts to name calling or trolling. Criticism can lead to more awareness which could lead to a better implementation down the pike, even if there's alot of headbutting in the process. Outright silencing the dissent is counterproductive.

I also don't think reporting about being banned/silenced for such criticism is perpetuating the drama/toxicity of the community for the sake of it when it's a real world outcome.

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I've seen this play out a few times now in a few different communities: systemd, Gnome/GTK, wider JavaScript and PHP communities, and probably some others.

There is legitimate reasonable criticism of these things, even today.

However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are all treated the same by the developers. You kind of need to insulate yourself to some degree.

For example, consider my write-up of the "GTK thumbnail issue" at [1] (I since deleted my account there, but that was written by me). It's easy to come off with a bad impression of the Gnome/GTK developers based on that, but at the same time ... they've been subject to so much unreasonable whining and criticism that it has also created this dynamic.

There's tons of examples like this. Also see: every time GIMP comes up on HN, with people ranting and whining about all sorts of things. I wouldn't be surprised if the GIMP devs don't even bother reading HN any more.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/ky5yop/gnome_has_no_thumbnails_file_pick...

I would argue that at least some of the grief GNOME gets is deserved. Especially given their attitude towards their users.

As I said, some grief is deserved in all these cases. But unreasonable criticism makes people also not listen to more reasonable (deserved) criticism. That was my entire point.

That you're completely ignoring this and instead just reply with an unsubstantial and off-topic dig at gnome is an excellent demonstration of my point.

Wasn't actually off-topic since you specifically mentioned them.

And a lot the incidents I can think of, of people being unreasonable there, came AFTER attempts at reasonable requests were ignored.

But sure go off.

> However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are all treated the same by the developers. You kind of need to insulate yourself to some degree.

If you need to insulate yourself to the degree that you ban someone for answering the question “V or Go?” with “Go, obviously”[1] then what’s the point of even maintaining a community? All you’ll end up with is a bunch of yes-women.

[1] Is V production-ready?—no. Is Go? Yes, for a long time.

What he is saying rings true. There is a level to all of this "that's beyond the pale".

> Is V production-ready?—no. Is Go? Yes, for a long time.

Go is a 10 years older (from 2009) corporate creation. It's not an apples to apples comparison, which can easily set the stage for tension in an interaction. It does not make sense to compare how production-ready a much older language is to a younger volunteer open source language in beta (and whose site and version number indicate that's so).

I dunno, I've been using gimp for literally decades and for about a year recently, it couldn't paste from the clipboard. I didn't even bother reporting the bug because I knew I'd come across like an entitled whiner in today's atmosphere.

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