It's unlikely that there will be any further releases of mt32-pi
github.com
github.com
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.
Some people just cannot stand being a “lesser-than” in their own minds, and will rip apart others. It’s always been there, but the social media and data harvesting era of today has made it easier than ever to terrorize someone you just plain dislike.
I hate that they’ve been pushed to ending the project so abruptly, but I hope they find joy again soon.
There is also I think a distinction between people whose toxic behavior comes from their miscalibrates sense of entitlement and people whose toxicity comes from their desire to bully someone.
Having done a lot of volunteer work, I know firsthand that many people simply don't realize how much effort goes into something that seems simple. They will make suggestions and sometimes demands, pressing the value and importance of what they're asking. But they don't step up to help. This doesn't rise to the level of bullying and harassment, but it can be extremely frustrating, draining, and discouraging.
”Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models” (2018)
It’s a review article on the research topic Anger and Interpersonal Aggression.
It reviews a lot of interesting knowledge from neuroimmunobiology to the sociobehavioral implications.
It takes a considerable amount of time, skill and engineering to create great emulators, and yet people still find reasons to complain or even harass developers of the projects they themselves are using.
It's just bizarre. I've seen some of it as a maintainer of some open source projects, but it's never escalated to harassment or what the OP describes. I really cannot relate to anyone that treats others like that.
The "power user" demographic simultaneously lacks the experience with OSS development to sympathize, and possesses the motivation/ability to hunt you down to reach out to you. Even worse if you end up stumbling into the realm of technically inclined children (Minecraft modding can only be done by completely blocking any form of player feedback).
The idea of spending hours every day for years straight on something you have to keep secret from almost everyone just... really sucks.
I think it's just simply that there is a tiny percentage of the population that is dysregulated (and a large portion that is dysregulated a tiny part of the time)-- once your project is seen by enough people eventually some of these people cast their interest your way.
The communications mediums we use and prevailing cultures (e.g. see "geek social fallacies") are highly vulnerable to abuse, and a few abusers with axes to grind can easily enlist additional abuse from large mobs particularly where communication is public and durable. As contributors patience wears thin they become more exposed, both due to reduced kindness trigging more abusers and their justified intolerance of abuse looking more unreasonable to outsiders.
For most open source development the incentives to contribute are pretty thin. People do it because they enjoy working with co-contributors, helping out the public, and getting some positive recognition. It doesn't take much to turn that net-negative.
There is some level of attack that probably improves friendships and social cohesion. When it's just one wingnut that shows up on your mailing list the community can nuke them from orbit and everyone (except the wingnut, I suppose) can feel good about it ("Can you believe that guy?" "I know, right?!"). But when the attacks are mild enough that it's not obvious if you should ban them, when they come in with a twitter army, when it just won't stop-- it can really sap the energy out of projects.
I think projects could improve by moving more of their regular workflow to invite-only mediums-- private repositories, issue trackers, etc. If someone wants to complain about your project then they can do it on their own forum, they don't get to use the projects tools as a platform to crap on the project and deprive the contributors of their freedom to ignore the noise.
But I'm not sure, the highly open culture today has advantages in gaining new contributors but even if you're willing to eschew those advantages the change in norms makes that less viable. In 1998 you totally expected to email some patches to the developers of a project then get invited onto their email threads or a private mailing list. Today because the norm is some open github repository it's not clear how many people would be willing to work the old way.
Yessss!!! Or, in other words: Stop to make everything social media, stop making 'like' buttons your god, and get real again.
That would be sooooo helpful. For many parts of life.
You won't loose so much imho. It's a lot overhyped. Sure you lose all the people who are basically there for the social media factor. Well... I see no problem with that. Their perceived worth is much much higher than their real one. Social media is all about a big show. Not about actually delivering actual value.
Btw, in some regards, the private mailing list is a lot more 'open' than proprietary cloud services instead (i.e. discord).
I mean, perhaps they have depression, but this is pretty awful. It’d make me want to quit.
It's insanely stressful and discouraging to be harassed, threatened, pseudo-stalked and have your work stolen for profit. Often the healthiest thing to do is to walk away from toxic situations and invest your time, attention and pursuits elsewhere.
That said, circumstances like these can certainly cause lasting depression. I just don't perceive the OP's behavior stemming from depression, it seems like a perfectly logical and healthy reaction in response to a shitty situation.
I personally have experienced a lot of bad stuff too. It is sort of par for the course if you make popular projects. I'm lucky that I'm not that affected by these side effects of high profile projects.
But I've known of two different individuals I've collaborated with (I've worked with a lot of people over the last 30 years) who have suffered from real periodic depression and it exhibits itself as emphasizing everything bad and minimizing anything good and basically saying nothing is worth it. In the moment for these individuals they truly believe this, but it is actually a real depressive episode that is colouring their judgement. I think the depressive episodes have triggers, but most of what gets described as the cause and the situational problem is just a symptom of the depressive episode. At least this person is acting, the more worrisome type of response I've seen is a lack of action/withdrawal as that doesn't really fix anything and then it isn't clear how long the episode will last.
There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.
https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...
looks spicy but almost a year old, maybe the guy continued to harass.
I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.
This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.
I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species.
Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.
Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.
The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.
Sure but they also give consistency, avoid the sheen of "you can behave badly if you do it infrequently", and avoid the kind of loophole lawyering you often get when rules aren't consistently and stringently applied.
> usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point.
Having been in many forums where bad behaviour[0] was not rooted out at source immediately and forcefully, I can say from my experience that also ends up badly. Perhaps not for the people in charge and their favoured brethren, I'll grant you.
[0] Including my own on occasion, I am ashamed to say with hindsight.
You find a new moderator who won't stand for it. They start escalating moderation action, and the wider moderation team follows their example
If you're at the point where your community is so toxic that you can't find a moderator... you need a ban wave. Good luck
An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.
And again, for actual crime, it's not the forum moderators at all who should lead some actions. That would really be problematic.
The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.
E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.
When I debuted my own first major retro project, "Building the REAL Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I went to absolute lengths to prove my research was done with such absurd meticulousness simply out of fear that I'd be targeted by Vogons and bullied into oblivion for it. I spent two years and thousands of dollars buying old hardware just to ensure every little detail was as perfect as I could make it.
Other much larger youtubers such as PhilsComputerLab received so much abuse over the years they straight up left the site entirely.
Another friend of mine was also recently harassed by a user on that site, snarkily editing all his posts with ".Deleted because it was useful but ignored." after giving useless commentary [2]
Vogons is a blight. The files hosted on it should be moved to the Internet Archive and the website allowed to sink into linkrot oblivion. There's very little useful information on it to begin with, just a bunch of angry old men smugly jerking each other off about "period correct" 90's computer builds
> Pisound is an ultra-low latency high-quality sound card and MIDI interface specially designed for Raspberry Pi pocket computers.
> Equipped with 192kHz 24-bit Stereo Input and Output driven by the legendary Burr-Brown chips, DIN-5 MIDI Input and Output ports, user-customizable button and bundled software tools, this little Raspberry Pi HAT will bring your audio projects to a whole new level!
And seems to be pretty much ready to go as soon as you get it:
> Setup is Eaaasy!
> Pisound mounts directly onto Raspberry Pi, no additional power adapter or soldering is required.
Return to Cathedral.
What does this mean?
Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed.
It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.
They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems.
Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too.
In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX.
A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion.
Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
I suppose "ignore some asshole in your email" is easier, and also hard to pile on comments in a private email box. But beyond that, I'd say having an issue tracker is a net positive, as is the ability to create PRs easily.
I wouldn't say that "social media-izing" is a good way to describe any of that, but I understand what you mean.
The main problem is probably more "brigading" from Twitter/X/Mastodon/Facebook/whatnot.
There is a continuum between totally private and what github provides, with self hosted tools you could hit a number of different spots on that spectrum. Cynically one reason for the lack of flexibility is that the maximally permissive side is probably better for the expansion of Github's business.