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Comment by talentedcoin | Hacker News Reader

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.

Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.

https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect.

(Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)

Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.

Aren't you guilty of the same thing by generalising that "technical people <love> simple laws and rules"? Also, calling people arrogant and simple-minded is a great example of behaviour that makes it difficult to hold a community together. We can have discussions without having to resort to insults.

I mean this is one case where the "law" is arguably true

The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum

Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example

I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.

what was the Nix schism? Did something like systemd happen? or like, Determinate/commercial vs Not? Or more like USA culture wars / code-of-conduct flamers (i vaguely recall some drama around a conference sponsor)?

anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.

The creator of Nix soft-forked it and started a company, that sort of inevitably leads to bad vibes I think

Can’t say I blame him, given the tone of some of the convos on the discourse site.

The fork occured before most of the drama.

The most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down

https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/

The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community

I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea

https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/c...

If you're unemployed enough, I have a long winded video on the 2022-2024 drama. From the perspective of the guy who was labeled a nazi and banned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0FI8Gw1iA

This was such a sad period, and I'm still sad at how you were treated. I hope in cooler times that the lifetime ban is lifted.

That would require assumption of good faith from all participants.

This resignation post reinforces the view that there is little good faith assumptions amongst the broader Nix ecosystem.

Whatever the legitimate issues were, the letter undermines its own credibility with its overbearing and self-righteous tone. Aside from Determinate Systems and the Anduril bit, the complaints lack specificity. The Blueskyisms thrown around here are just as indicative of "cultural problems" as anything else, assuming these views are representative of the community.

Yeah it's incredibly vague and one of the only specific examples it gives is this thread, which already was locked and delisted and the OP banned?

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/objection-to-minority-represen...

It's absurd to view this as a reason Eelco himself should be forced out of a project he himself created.

>The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community

>For context, Anduril is a military contractor who produce drones using machine learning on Nvidia GPUs on NixOS as well as ML based systems for detecting migrants on the US-Mexico border, cheapening state violence against migrants.

Given that ICE are currently breaking into peoples apartments and rounding people up into concentration camps, would it not be logical to conclude that the company providing software for the agency are fascists and by extension Eelco relitigating the sponsorship policy can be taken as allowing fascists in the community?

Technology creates cliques. Some of them formed for good reasons, others maybe not.

The nature of nix prevents the nix community from being a group of like minded people because it tries to be a unifying layer over technology which is not made by like minded people. To do what nix does, you need to overcome whatever forces caused those cliques to form in the first place. You need representatives from each group. It's a bit like congress, which has similar problems.

And its not just disparate language communities. It's people who want to build influential businesses, and its people who want to insulate themselves against the influence of tech business. Its people who think it's OK to build killer robots, and it's people who don't want to be killed by those robots.

Getting people work together is hard. Nixpkgs tries to do that to such a degree that you can put a version number the result. Maybe it's admirable, maybe it's folly. I think it's both.

I'm not going to blame the people who are ambitious enough to try because as far as I'm aware, whatever other successful communities exist, they're succeeding at a less audacious goal.

Because people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.

It's a combination of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the emergence of WokeWare over the past decade.

For too many, building and celebrating things just because they are cool isn't enough.

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