My takeaway:
"Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."
"Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."
This is really interesting, maybe you want to think for a minute yourself before I reveal the reason. When I watched the documentation to the end I was surprised, but when I think about it now I'm not surprised anymore:
Car driving involves no eye contact, in fact you hardly ever see the face of the other person. People behave differently and more nicely when they look into each other's face. One illustrative example were Laughter Clubs. People go there to laugh. So when a new member joins, all others stand around him, start to laugh and look him in the eye. No matter if the laughter starts artificially, only few moments later the person in the middle cannot stop laughing... ;)
Back to the topic: Twitter is probably the most impersonal way to communicate. E-Mailing with my tax consultant is more personal. I cannot tell how often I realized that misunderstandings were created with E-Mails (which have arbitrary length.) Or even text messages which are limited to ~500 characters; but Twitter? 140 character stubs to talk to complete strangers?
"But open source is right and we are the good guys?!", or... "But I know those guys and they are usually really cool!"
We want to categorize people as being bad or good, and it messes with our brain when we think we may have to re-categorize. It's more useful to realize that we all have a capacity to do both good and harm. It's also more useful to judge ourselves than others. Recognizing the need to change is the beginning. I know that I need Outside help to maximize the good and minimize the bad that I am capable of.
If one feels that 140 characters isn't sufficient to correctly represent one's nuanced thoughts, then don't tweet.
I doubt you could find many twitter accounts (barring commercial PR stuff) whose history is entirely free of rudeness.
There is no "open source hivemind" so please don't disparage the millions of open source coders who will never make the frontpage of HN by lumping the entire conglomerate into one community.
Look at this quote:
> nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding
What a prick!
Note that of course there's an element of "uncomfortable truth" to this—evaluating programmers' ability is probably a good thing, and he's right to a degree. We all know amazing and experienced programmers who write libraries that are like diamonds in the rough compared to other coders' work, but 1) you have to be tactful; you don't put people down for their code no matter what, because 2) you have to help them get there, and negativity is not how you do that.