Mt32-pi developer quits due to community harassment | Hacker News Reader

Mt32-pi developer quits due to community harassment

github.com

44 pointszdw54 comments

Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955613

Looks like maintainer going through a tough time, no details of whatever happened but it doesn't look like it was public harassment, wish the best for them.

I like how you linked to this:

> I have endured a sustained campaign of abuse from members of the VOGONS forum, been labelled a "clout-chaser", had threats sent to my personal email address, code been used in other projects without proper accreditation, my 3D print designs stolen and sold by faceless eBay/Etsy sellers, personal attacks made towards me when people don't get their feature request... the list goes on and on.

>There is only so much I can take.

>My mental health has been in decline as a direct result of this behavior; the joy of working on this project has pretty much gone. There is nothing to be gained from putting time and hard work into it any more. There is no gratitude, no encouragement - just entitled behavior and grift.

And concluded that it is a mystery why he quit.

I wonder why this doesn't happen with other devs who maintain widely used wares like Sindre Sorhus or even old timer like David DeSandro. If it does to them happen I wonder what they're doing that the mt32 pi dev isn't. I dunno ... I don't get out much but this seems to be a 3 dimensional corner case or as one commenter here put it, the cause might be something else

Most people that see this happening stay away from it in the first place. Even friends of mine that has no clue about programming has seen how people behave against new users on forums that they would never touch linux with a long stick.

[flagged]

There's often some intersection of one or two toxic individuals (or at least perceived as such) and someone who, for whatever personality or life circumstances reasons, just isn't prepared to deal with it. It's not commentary so much as an observation that people putting themselves out in public invite, rightly or wrongly, public commentary.

Some communities can also just become disproportionately toxic as a whole.

"someone being mean on the internet" seems needlessly reductive

how about dozens of people being mean (on/off internet, why does it matter, everything’s in the internet now) every day, over and over, for months on end, specifically targeting you

"thin skinned" is unfair given what the dev claims to have endured

This happens far too often, but I’ve never seen good advice on how to prevent it. All I ever see is “we as users need to be better.”

The only techniques I’ve seen that appear to be long term effective are:

1. Be a gruff asshole who just doesn’t engage with the community or give a shit what they say or want or think

2. Don’t publish your code, or publish it anonymously and never interact with users

3. Luck into having your project be in such a niche that the only users are likeminded people who aren’t assholes

None of these are amazing, but otherwise you’re basically guaranteed to run into this eventually.

Best advice is to not do something under your personal name but a shadow corporation like the rest of them. Ever tried getting support from Google? Or getting a human on the phone at Apple?

The project maintainer needs to reinvent themselves as an anonymous avatar and release software/hardware as Acme Corp. P.Midi or somebody.

It only takes a small number of insane users to cause massive drama, unfortunately.

If they are in some high tens, they are no small number.

When you find out, let the Nobel committee know. This kind of thing is not limited to open source - it generalises across all of society and is collapsing it as we speak. Somehow we keep giving power to annoying trolls instead of taking it away.

It is the commercial Internet. Basically quantity instead of quality. People should realize they cannot give everything away and accept to communicate with everybody. They should stop using big platforms like Github that optimizes for numbers. The communication should have some gates in the place. Not for the sake of gatekeeping but for filtering non-intellectual communication.

Enforcing real names helps somewhat, but doesn't eliminate the problem entirely.

I think you might be surprised by how little shame humans can have... I've been amazed at the abuse people will post even with a real name and real photo avatar of themselves, yet some of the best online communities I've been on have been pseudonymous and just well moderated...

I used to think that True Names were something of a solution. These days I'm much less sure. A lot of people don't seem to care.

They are also dangerous, because the same shared reputation that allows a "good person" to hunt down a misbehaving "bad person" also allows the reverse, if the "bad people" are effectively outnumbered.

("All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing" - the effective number of "good people" is often zero)

Oh trust me, I'm aware how horrible people can be. But it still makes some difference, and more than a pessimist might think.

... and even more, if it were universally applied, the lack of opportunities for toxic ideas to fester in anonymous fora would reduce the incidence of them crossing over towards reality.

There’s an argument to be made that if you’re not prepared to deal with all of that, don’t become popular - either online or in meatspace, because it will happen.

Becoming popular isn’t generally something an open source developer chooses to do or not do.

It's something a developer chooses to do or not do though. No need for a public repo to do development.

It's a reasonable argument that, if you don't want to deal with some of the inevitable consequences of popularity, basically don't put yourself out in public at all. It's rarely an actual requirement for a lot of things. You can make videos for yourself without posting on YouTube for example (as most people who historically made hobby videos did).

That’s a wild argument, up there with “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

People should be able to produce and publish content without being harassed.

>People should be able to produce and publish content without being harassed.

I don't disagree. (Assuming the content isn't of a nature that deserves a lot of criticism though that's in the eye of the beholder and is a matter of degree of course.)

But there's also the real world where putting yourself out in public can have consequences, especially if you become particularly popular. You take the good with the bad and decide if the tradeoff is worth it.

> Assuming the content isn't of a nature that deserves a lot of criticism though that's in the eye of the beholder of course

The fact that people think there are kinds of content that warrant harassment is kinda the root of this whole problem.

Not to make this political but you don't think there's a lot of content being thrown around at the moment that warrants criticism? Generally speaking I'd draw the line at outright personal harassment although I suppose that's again in the eye of the beholder.

I think there's tons of content that warrants criticism, but no content that warrants harassment.

And I'd say that's a pretty gray line, especially to the degree it stays in an online context.

None of that sounds like a gray area to me.

There's an argument to be made that whether that rises to the level of harassment is up to the recipient of the of behaviour in question.

Another person may well just see it as a cost of doing business, a cost of operating in the world. There will be detractors, some of those will be malevolent snakes. We can mostly just ignore those as they very rarely represent a real and immanent threat.

If you've got nothing better to do with your time than waste it trying to antagonise a situation, you're probably wasting your life. And maybe the recipient can come to understand they can choose to be flattered by the attention - if many people are exerting effort to put you down, more power to you - you might actually be doing something important, and people hate that.

Suggesting that people who publish open source should be flattered by harassment is a fascinating take.

Trolls get traced and fined in Germany. It ought to be done everywhere. The 1st Amendment is taken too literally in the U.S.. Insults, abuse, and blatant lies have no place in public discourse.

The First Amendment is not what grants you freedom of speech. You are born with it. It is your right, regardless of what any law, contract or person says. The First Amendment simply prohibits the government from infringing on it.

Fun fact, Weimar Germany back in the 1920s also had a lot of those types of laws (defamation lawsuits were very common, hate speech laws were also rather strict for their time, etc). The US on the other hand had more restrictions on speech (due to contemporary jurisprudence and interpretation of the 1st amendment) than it does now, but the law was still overall rather similar to what it is now.

So I sure know which model I prefer, and even though Germany today isn't Germany of the 1920s, the US still has had a much better track record when it comes to sensible free speech policy. Again, not saying that Germany is "worse" w.r.t free speech nowadays, just that the US has a system that has worked for centuries, and the fact that Germany has different laws don't make them better.

As an American who appreciates a strictly literal interpretation of the first amendment, it's very funny to me that a German not only takes pride in their government hunting down and suppressing inconvenient speech, but wants the rest of the world to fall in line.

The power of brainwashing. The results are somewhat unreal. Britons want Ukrainians to fight more than Ukrainians themselves. The explanation is Britons don't see hundreds of thousands deaths. Their media reprints reports from Zelinkiy office which state just a few thousands. This is called 'Support Ukraine' and they are proud of it. Till the last Ukrainian. Some politicians are more open and clearly say it's a cheap way to kill Russians. They want the war to continue. This is called 'strong position' or 'position of power'.

We are kind of in the middle of a speech war right now. The speech doesn't directly cause harm - but susceptible individuals cause harm via non-speech actions on the basis of that speech.

It's fine if your opinion on the best way to fight a war is to not fight, but that's just your opinion and not necessarily a good one.

I’m an American. I saw it on 60 Minutes last night. Any reason why you prefer the strictly literal interpretation? The difference between a personal insult and a criticism of something someone has done seems pretty clear cut to me. We could use more constructive discourse especially in the US.

Every amendment should be taken literally. How else should your rights be interpreted? Figuratively?

I agree with you that people are much better off using constructive dialogue, and communities like HN are much better off because of moderation, but the idea of some government agency tracking down and fining trolls is to me a laughable suggestion.

Stretching and bending can go long way. Did you know there are zillons of sexes now? It's not the brain, it's the wrong body. For each psychological disorder.

Yeah they’re real Nazis about it.

You know the first amendment was written by people who would shoot you for running your mouth, right?

you mean this one: “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say...

I am referring to the history of dueling in this country, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of people engaged with reality here.

duels happened everywhere, that was normal. you can't judge ancestors by modern standards.

Didn’t Germany just have a recent major free speech issue where people were jailed for using “the wrong language” while protesting?

Doesn’t seem like it’s a good policy.

You might want to check in on protestors in the US.

An over-militarized police state is an entirely different issue than suppression of speech as national policy.

Still extremely serious, but not at all the same thing.

As someone who has run quite a few projects and communities in the past, my tip is straightforward: ban hammer on the first instance, no warnings, no questions.

At the first sight of an idiot, nuke them from orbit and do the same to anyone who hints compassion towards the idiot.

This ensures more good people will flock, because often they refrain from engaging because they can't stand idiots.

A maintainer's work is a labor of love; if it's not a joy anymore, it stops.

This, to my mind, is one of the key reasons to keep community standards pretty high, and react to violations pretty swiftly, even not when you're a moderator, but just as a member of the community. Acting vile will just drive away all the people who make the community worth existing.

Note: This is a good idea if your goal is to not be bothered while developing your software project where you are the DFL. It's not necessarily a good idea if your goal is to run a discussion forum, because the risk of misclassifying people on first glance, and banning people who other people actually want to talk to, is pretty high, and people won't want to walk on eggshells. That isn't a constraint for a DFL software project because you're the only person people are coming onto your platform to talk to.

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