The FOSS community acts like a cult and it's not helping the cause | Hacker News Reader

The FOSS community acts like a cult and it's not helping the cause

torrent-empress.leaflet.pub

11 pointsAloha16 comments

I understand the gripes OP is having. But as a maintainer, it's also downright exhausting to have so many people complaining about random quirky missing features or setups that I can't replicate.

If you can contribute improvements in a low-friction way, I will happily improve it. But if you're just going to complain ...

There's an impedance mismatch between what developers want (work on advanced features & clean code) and users want (have a product that fits their specific workflow then gets out of the way).

This is solved by users giving the developers money so the developer will do what the user wants. Sometimes a business sits in the middle to facilitate this transaction.

I've almost never seen FOSS figure out a good way of fixing this mismatch. The rare exceptions are when people derive intrinsic joy from getting marketshare against an evil corporation. Or Space Station 13, which let anyone add half-baked broken features and the interaction between it all was part of the fun.

I'm a product manager in my day job - and, I guess the gripe I have with FOSS stuff, is they're all too often designed as expert systems - which is great, super powerful, lots of control, but not suited to the workflows actual users just want to do out of the box.

Category error. FOSS is typically not made for consumers to use directly. At least, not the source code. Downloadable binaries, that's another thing.

"FOSS stuff" encompasses tons of software, from 1980s emacs distros to 2020-era GNOME music players. And the simple, workflow-focused FOSS tools I use are great.

There are criticisms to make of FOSS, but there are so many racist and sexist tangents here that hurt the credibility of the author, imo.

If they want better UX in FOSS, they should volunteer and encourage their fellow UX designers to volunteer. I don’t understand why the expectation is for the FOSS developers to reach out and ask someone to work for free. That’s quite awkward. Most of these UIs in FOSS are not made by designers, they are made by developers out of necessity. They’re doing the best they can working outside of their comfort zone for the good of the community. Their attempts should be commended, not criticized. If someone thinks they can do better, by all means, help out and do better. Don’t wait to be asked.

At the end of the day, if this person doesn’t want to use FOSS, no one is forcing anything. This rant seemed wholly unnecessary. It also seemed they never grasped the reason why FOSS zealots are the way they are. It’s not about free as in beer, it’s about the freedom. Having options available that aren’t proprietary keeps the proprietary apps from becoming tyrannical, to some degree. Even if someone chooses to use proprietary software, they are still better off because of the FOSS die hards who keep the door open to alternatives. They are willing bear the more difficult tasks for their ideals. This person didn’t seem to share those ideals and I’m struggling to understand why they even went down this road. Just to get away from AI? That seems like an extreme reaction from someone who doesn’t want to be inconvenienced in any way.

A lot of moralizing for someone who “doesn’t believe in morality.”

"Talk to any FOSS acolyte about something and the conversation will often go like this:

You: I'm having a problem with [proprietary software], I'm really frustrated.

Them: scoffs I don't have that problem because I use a custom rom dinglebop shitfuck linux distro that allows me to [technical jargon that you don't know or care about]

You: uhm, okay. Could you give me a recommendation that'll allow me to replicate my workflow in [proprietary program] ?

Them: Uhm yeah (sends you a program that is incredibly hard to set up and cannot replicate your workflow at all)

You: I don't really understand how this works? Them: okay well post in the discord

You: posts in discord Uhm people were just really rude to me and told me to just read the forums.... I watched some tutorials but they're all like 2 hours long and this is a lot of information."

The author doesn't come off well at all here, and that's while they're talking to a strawman. They sound like an entitled child.

This is barely a strawman in my eyes, it's a slightly exaggerated reality. Especially the part where the recommendation is something that doesn't actually solve your issue, and when you mention that you get told to just not do the thing you want to do.

I don't necessarily mean from maintainers, but from people who use and swear by OSS stuff.

Even if it's not a strawman, the only actual problem is the FOSS person saying that some program can replicate her workflow when they don't actually know if it can. And even that is not malice or callousness, it's just someone clumsily trying to help. Everything else is her demanding support from volunteers and then getting angry when it turns out that FOSS is often a lot harder to use than proprietary software. If the FOSS person instead said "Sorry, I'm not interested in troubleshooting that for you", I guarantee that that would be seen as a problem. So essentially what she's saying is fuck FOSS users because they don't provide perfect support for free.

There is no such a thing as 'FOSS community' and FOSS people.

This blogs says a lot about the author...

But flagging this is submission is overkill imho.

The Discord anecdote and the reactions your post got reminded me of something from this: https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/what-you-can-learn-...

"text-only conversations are toxic"

..such has been my takeaway from a lot of online discussions, unfortunately. But I feel like it wasn't always like this? My reminiscences of being a kid on IRC was that people used to be nicer when chatting or posting. I feel like software communities used to be more wholesome too, even though there were BOFH types running rampant back then. There's just so much nastiness now. Text discussion platforms like Discord often feel like walking into an animal shelter and a bunch of abused stray dogs begin viciously barking at you from their cages like they want to rip you to pieces. Even though you know they wouldn't talk like to someone like that IRL, just like the barking dog might wag its tail and beg for affection if it was let out. Maybe it's just a reflection of how society has changed/broken and how angry everybody is. And in terms of FOSS how burnt-out people are which you talked about. Looking back, 9/11 was the beginning of a slow descent into Zhang Xianzhong-style "Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill" mode IMO. I really feel there's some kind of social decay going on around how we treat each other in addition to the perennial issues of privilege, gatekeeping behaviors etc.

There is absolutely room for improvement in the culture of FOSS, and absolutely a gaping hole of UI/UX focus that I don't think anyone except the most deranged "hrm just recompile the kernel, I did it three times already today" forks would argue. But my dude is not the guy to fix this. He has no answers, just complaints.

I think what he's missing is that most FOSS development goes unfunded or underfunded; complaining about it is like complaining that the local soup kitchen doesn't offer paleo options. Feel free to roll up your sleeves and get to cooking, my dude.

My personal FOSS project isn't in public beta yet, but when I'm reading the docs and forums for other people's software, it's absolutely astonishing how entitled some people are. They show up being pissed that this thing you made for yourself in your spare time and then decided to very kindly release into the world for anyone to use and improve isn't tailored to their needs or running on their particular goofy ass rig (it's amazing that people can buy a whole ass Chromebook and then ask if you can run something like Blender on it and get mad when you tell em you can't without doing chroot or whatever the current way of getting Linux up and running on it is.)

He's right about the community as a whole being less than enthusiastic about inclusivity, but he doesn't actually sound like the guy to fix that either. And that problem is tons more complicated to solve than he probably understands it to be.

But in the same way you can fork a project and fix it and submit it to be merged into the main branch, he could also do what I did and take his ass to the developing world to see how to fix that problem too. If he did, he'd probably discover that people outside the global North-centric tech culture are more than used to solving problems without help and that us middle aged middle class white guys have more to learn from them about working around limitations and solving problems than we do to teach them. That's my experience anyway.

I know that it strikes most people as faintly ridiculous if not outright dangerous to talk about anti-white-male sentiment, but can we at least stop kowtowing to it? Like, sure, "first-world problems", I get it. But there is constant vitriol spewing from certain (for lack of a better phrase) intellectual cliques, and it's gotten tiresome.

  > there is constant vitriol spewing from certain (for lack of a better phrase) intellectual cliques

its an unnecessary provocation imo; just causes people to turn their brains off

It's pretty clearly ragebait. I don't think the author is making a good-faith plea here.

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