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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Well, when you say "the victim could just not have succumbed to the pressure" I don't see how that doesn't blame the victim. I understand it's not your intention, but peer pressure works exactly because it gets around people's "wait, I don't actually want to do this" defense, and to say "just don't do it, nobody is physically forcing you to" ignores that fact.

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.

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Anything can be viewed as a judgement statement if you paraphrase or stretch things enough. I don't think your paraphrasings are a fair representation of what I actually said.

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.

But what's the advice here? "When people are trying to peer pressure you, don't accept?"

More or less, yes. Also see my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883598

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.

> 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).

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

Yes? Block, move on. It's the internet, you aren't forced to interact with anyone. If you are, get a better source code hosting platform.

> I don't think your paraphrasings are a fair representation of what I actually said.

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".

Giving out advice for concrete steps someone can take to prevent a problem isn't victim blaming. Unless we're all content with people just sitting and whining all the time instead of actually doing anything to help themselves. And let's be real, we're talking about open source contributions, not getting mugged for wearing the wrong clothing here.

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