This ignores the very fact that peer pressure works and puts the entire blame on the victim. No, people react differently when pressured vs when not pressured. That's the entire reason why peer pressure works.
The peanut gallery of non-contributors are only peers in the sense that they pretend to speak on behalf of some OSS community. And the fact that they are spokespersons is by default suspect. The attacker is a peer in the sense of being a contributor. So is he a peer pressurer? Again we come back to the teenager who has to follow the whims of his peers in order to be included. The maintainer is already inside of his own playground. So the pressure to be part of the “community” is really the incredibly abstract thing that the peanut gallery was referring to: you ought to do so-and-so in order to be whatever I think of in my head as an OSS maintainer.
This can be rejected out of hand if you really believe that maintainers don’t owe anyone anything (because of free labor).
But this gets incoherent if you want to assert both of these things:
1. There is no social contract for OSS maintainers: they can toss their PC out of the window and go on a five-year pilgrimage without telling anyone
2. There is some community which has power over the maintainer to peer pressure them
If you really want to double down on (1), the “cure” is what the OP suggested: say no and walk away.
I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit.
In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery.
In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties.
> I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here.
I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently.
> Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”.
In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people.
The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721
[2] Like asking about whether someone has a moral obligation to eat healthy. It’s not about other people.
Sure you do: everyone likes to comment on whether your volunteering work is an effective use of time and resources or not.
Peer pressure among adults is far more widespread and powerful than the limited peer pressure among teenagers.
I hate this trend of shouting "victim blaming!" once someone tries to explain things or analyse anything. Not everything needs to be a value judgement. "X happened, and Y could have prevented it" is not a judgement.
If I were in the maintainer's shoes, and was feeling ambivalent about handing over maintenance to a fairly unknown person, this kind of social attack would definitely push me over the edge, exactly as it was planned to.
But you can insert "I'm not trying to blame anyone, but here are some suggestions to modify cultural norms so these things are less likely to happen in the future" if you want. Or you can just assume good faith and take that as implied unless demonstrated otherwise.
Also: as far as I'm concerned there is no "peer pressure" here because these people aren't "peers". They're just some random people who, as near as I can tell, have done fuck all. There is not even an attempt to help out. Not even the question on how to help out. These people are supposed to be the maintainer's peers? Yeah nah. They're just shouty entitled internet nobodies that have not even attempted to contribute anything constructive or signal any willingness to do so (not even "I have been using the patch in production for half a year without problems", which would actually be a small but useful way to help out).
When it comes to these types of things you need to accept that you can't change every person in the world; you can only change yourself. If you cycle a lot you better learn to anticipate assholes doing asshole things. Is that fair? No. But it beats being run over and getting hospitalized, or worse.
That’s what I find incoherent about it.
1. The consumers are little ants that have no real power over anybody, certainly not to help the project itself
2. On the other hand they are powerful enough to peer pressure the only person who has the power to drive the project forward
I think their paraphrasing was a fair representation. You want to have it both ways. You said some incendiary victim-blaming thing, but now you're backpedaling with a "no no, you misunderstood".