Maybe the solution is to just leave that cesspool that is Twitter? Seems like the harassment has less to do with being a minority and more with angering the Shitter mob which can happen to anyone.
The solution is to leave the cesspool that is JavaScript. For some reason these sorts of "scandals" only happen with Node.js, React and other JS libraries.
Not just JS, any sort of webdevs. You don’t get this in communities where there are actual technical skills required to participate. When was the last time a scandal rocked the ASM world? Never.
I wish more people would take this advice. When you leave the site after deleting your account, and happen to revisit it (via clicking the OP), you realise that everyone is incredibly furious about so much - brexit, sexism, someone clumsily articulated a point in 280 characters.
Being amped up to 11 for a good chunk of your day is definitely not healthy for you, and probably makes you lose sight of the actual problems going on around you.
Agreed. It's also impossible to have any meaningful conversation on Twitter. Nuance is completely lost. A joke or sarcasm? Forget about it.
I may check Twitter once/week, but never post. It's honestly too stressful to try and figure out if what I post can be misinterpreted in some odd way because of the enforced brevity.
I think there was a marked improvement on my mood when I left twitter in like 2013. I'm way less irritated at small things, and way less annoyed at what appears to be pure ignorance and pure hatred over minor things.
Reading some of the responses in this thread, I feel my emotions rising like they used to on twitter. I want to respond to a lot of these comments.
But when I start typing out a response, I take a step back and say to myself, "what the fuck are you doing, man?" You're arguing some micro point on the internet. You're not going to change this person's mind, you're just trying to make a jab to get some karma so you can feel like your viewpoint is at least justified and makes sense to other people."
Then I realize what a dumb waste of time this is - I already know that my viewpoint isn't all that radical and may people share it. There's no sense in getting upset about this, or trying to assert what I think. I've done it a thousand times before.
So I'm gonna leave this thread and go play some video games instead. Hopefully that isn't too bro-y a thing to do.
Sounds like the usual crybully story again. Nazis, sexists everywhere, etc. pp.
The usual assertions without evidence are presented. Bad journalism in my opinion and people I basically view as crazy persons were proved to be correct again. Nice work.
On a more serious tone: this level of "I'm offended by []" is actually becoming counter productive. It's pushing talented, good people, with controversial lifestyle/opinion out of open source, out of the very thing that, in theory, should welcome contributions from anyone as long as it's technically sound and clear. (Related read I found this morning: https://mikkel.hoegh.org/2017/04/18/why-i-care-about-drupal-... )
Can we please go back to the nobody knows you're a dog times with pseudonyms and everything?
EDIT: "nobody knows you're a dog" requires the one behind the pseudonym to stay faceless and the community accept that anyone can be behind a pseudonym and approach the contribution/work/etc without assumptions. It's hard. It's never been properly done, but maybe it's time for this.
It's not a simple as that. Good open source collaboration often requires team work. Peoples' beliefs manifest in how they interact with other people. The code of conduct moderate that interaction.
It's not uncommon to see arguments that start in disagreement around technical details escalate into full blown ad hominem attacks.
This happened also in the olden days (linux kernel dev comes to mind), and it was never ok.
The problem isn’t pseudonyms, it’s assholes. People have worse behavior with pseudonymous accounts. Part of the problem with open source, or any large project or group, is that toxic personalities can “poison” the project and reduce overall output even if the toxic person is high performing.
It’s difficult to parlay work done under a pseudonym into a paying gig. Personal branding becomes particularly difficult as getting paid becomes two steps short of a money laundering operation.
It's like a stage name, a face, a persona, for a specific purpose. Under that persona one should keep focused on the topic, within the guidelines, etc. but outside they could be their own person.
Simple example: if the current trend continues, soon listening to certain music will become a problem. If someone listens to nordic black metal in their free time, outside of work communities, including online ones, so be it, because it has nothing to do with work communities.
This would require communities to respect and realize the need for this.
soon listening to certain music will become a problem
Most rap is violently misogynistic and homophobic, that’s another example. I don’t know if anyone was ever ostracised from a tech conference for listening to Eminem though.
Pseudonyms should be allowed if that's what people want for themselves, but that doesn't solve the problem of people who want to use their real identity but might be targeted for harassment as a result.
Pseudonymity by expectation is akin to requiring everyone to be "in the closet", even if they feel it's important for them not to be.
Anonymity also avoids unproductive and abusive viewpoint and history shaming.
What political party I belong to (or don't), or what position I hold on a controversial issue will almost never have any bearing on how well I can accomplish a programming task.
> It's pushing talented, good people, with controversial lifestyle/opinion out of open source, out of the very thing that, in theory, should welcome contributions from anyone as long as it's technically sound and clear.
What if the people who are being pushed out have been pushing other people out this whole time? People complain a lot about losing talented/high-profile developers because they made parts of the community uncomfortable, but then seem to ignore/minimize the way that person was driving other talented people--often from underrepresented/marginalized groups--away.
It may have been when these scandals started many moons ago and there are always exceptions to anything, but from what I've been reading for the past ~2 years, this is not the case any more.
People being pushed out are, in many if not most cases those who have a personal life, with personal view on life, which other can't accept, despite the fact that those views and their work are usually well separated from each other.
I don’t think they write articles/scandals on the huge amount of harassment people receive just for being a woman on the internet, or black on the internet. The reality is that (1) everyone gets harassed online (2) black people get harassed more than white people (3) women get harassed much much more than men. If all you’re reading is articles about “gates” then of course it seems like there is an assault on a specific type of person, but you need to adjust your priors to understand that many women receive that volume of abuse much more frequently and no one is writing articles on it. There might be acute attacks on individuals in scandals, but there is a constant mid to high level harassment on some individuals.
I've not challenged or questioned your points. The scandals, CoC, []Gate, on the other hand, doesn't really seems to be working, because they keep popping up. Hence the thought of pseudonyms.
I am not sure on your reasoning here. If they keep popping up, isn't that a good thing? More and more communities are seeing the internal problems these people are causing and are calling them out on it. I've never seen "ReactGate 2.0 cause the 1.0 people are still causing issues". I can't say every "gate" has fixed all their problems but acknowledging the issues and working towards a fix is a step in the right direction.
Is there any part of tech which succeeded and is now a blossoming haven of diversity? I mean, with so many people getting pushed out from everywhere else it should be easy to fill your rank with top talent, no? Given that we have a few million programmers in USA, you'd expect it to be a simple task to get a few thousand of these harassed people together to start something big.
I know there are a few projects with ~100 people, but I am not aware of anything larger than that which is not what we would expect. So the measures we apply today like CoC's seems to have no effect on how welcoming the industry feels to marginalized people.
I have no problem with reprimanding people that say caustic things about people while communicating in some project-specific forum. I personally draw the line at Linus' conduct in the past- he may have attacked people, but at least it was always entirely because of their code.
However, people have started policing other, non-project forums as well. That, I do not abide. Just because the person that submitted that PR was an absolute racist bigot on twitter a decade ago (or even last night), it has no bearing on the quality of their code. As long as it stays out of their code and their PR.
>As long as it stays out of their code and their PR.
That assumes that the only important thing about the ecosystem of a project is the code. The code is only going to be useful as long as there are people to continue building and maintaining it. I don't know about you, but I have a difficult time working with racists, regardless of the quality of their code. I'm not willing to overlook something like that just to get some code written.
Racists is such an overloaded term that this means basically nothing. It could mean that you refuse to work with people who burn crosses in black people's yards in which case basically everyone would agree with you, but it could mean that you refuse to work with people who made an ok-sign once without knowing that it had been adopted by white supremacists in which case most people would think you are ridiculous.
When people say that we should leave politics outside of it they mean the second kind.
In more remote open source projects some people advocate for the "everyone is anonymous" variant, in which case they think that nothing matters if the technical parts are good since they wont even know what they do outside of the project. But afaik not a lot of people argue for that in a normal workplace or for conferences.
What exactly does 'politics' mean in this case? Any concerns that aren't related to code? Can you define it in simple terms that leaves no gray areas?
Completely anonymous systems leads to abuse. This has been demonstrated over and over again.
The most insidious kinds of racism do not involve burning crosses. Obviously just flashing the ok-sign doesn't make you a racist. But society has clearly demonstrated that we are perfectly willing to tolerate the more subtle instances of racism for many reasons. In an environment like that, it's no surprise that the targets of that behavior become incredibly suspicious and distrusting.
The way to solve that problem is not to "leave politics out of it" or to complain that they are too sensitive. The way to solve that problem is to address the underlying problem.
I find people who assume men are prone to violence to be sexists. I also find people who dismisses struggles because someones skin is white and thus assumed "privileged" to be racists. I would prefer to not have to work with people who express such views but I can live with it if people just keep politics out of work and professional settings.
Trying to address the underlying problem of why people has such views is a complex proposition and involves deep discussions based on evidence from neuroendocrinology, primatology, sociology, gender roles, social stratification, historical causes regarding each, and so on. It might very well be impossible if people are not open minded to the idea in the first place.
Would you watch a movie where the Key Grip was a racist?
Would you eat a sandwich prepared by a racist?
Would you eat a cucumber grown by a racist?
Would you read a book written by a racist?
Would you read a book edited by a racist?
Would you engage in civil discourse with a racist?
I'm reminded of Steve Irwin. When asked if he minded taking money from unsavory people, he replied he'd take money from any source at all and use it to buy land to conserve it. I view code as the same way- that person is devoting time, a portion of their life, to freely write code for the betterment of all. That is not a free pass to treat people poorly; but if you dig hard enough in anybody's past, you'll probably find something to get upset about. I just think people shouldn't go looking for trouble.
Yes, it does get complicated. I love music, including the music of Wagner, who was an extremely shitty person on top of antisemitism. Once I learned about that, I re-examined my opinion of him, and my appreciation of his music changed, but did not disappear.
Part of the problem is that the world itself is incredibly complicated, and behaving ethically gets correspondingly complicated because of it (highlighted most excellently in The Good Place).
If you notice, I didn't set a hard rule. I just said, I have a difficult time working with racists. I don't believe that you can set hard rules for any of these things. which leads to another part of the problem: People want simple rules for how they should act, and things that will absolve them of being completely responsible for their actions. These things do not exist, and will never exist.
Everyone is always going to disagree about where the line should be drawn. As a society, we're terrible at managing those differences. We let our egos get in the way too often.
I believe I am not racist, but I still recognize that I can do things that will feel racist to others. In fact, I have done racist things in the past unintentionally. When I was called out on it, instead of letting my ego respond, I listened, and because of that, I became a better person.
If your intention is to be a kind person, then I've found that there generally isn't a problem in handling these things. If your intention is to be able to do what you want without consequences, or to protect your ego, then you're going to have problems.
Can you really say that about Dan Abramov and Ken Wheeler though? Some of the nicest and most inclusive people in the community. I've seen them both engage people all at different points in their career and be encouraging and positive. They are allies in this case but they are being turned into enemies for no reason. This reminds me a lot of BLM verbally attacking Sanders when he was the only person in their corner at the time.
This guy was attacked for having a picture where he used the OK sign a year ago? Everyone knows what the OK sign means and it isn’t “white power” except in a 4chan meme. And only people who are heavily plugged into politics know about that meme, normal people keep using the symbol for what it’s always meant. Context is key with any hand symbol.
I read the whole article and there didn’t seem to be any evidence of white supremacy either? Just an assertion that “move fast and break things” is somehow connected and similar other vague statements.
I was about to write that context is critical with all these secret hand signs. Apparently people who think any ok sign is some secret symbol have never watched a basketball game before.
As far as I can tell there wasn't any. Evidence of white supremacy I mean.
The "instigating event" apparently opened the floodgates of people who felt marginalized and ostracized by the react community. I couldn't really figure out who those people are, and what events/situations they were referring to.
I think it was mostly about women and misogyny after the initial blowout. Though I can't really pinpoint anything.
This is actually quite frustrating as someone looking from the outside - no one is really saying what it's about but everyone is acting as if it's a very big deal.
There may be something there, but outrage can easily become an end in itself.
(I have no dog in this hunt, haven't looked at it at all, it's just a social dynamic that I've seen playing out several times, especially in Twitter pile-ons based on limited or misleading quotes.)
From what I could see it was the negative focus on Ken Wheeler resulted in a lot of people who found his manner pretty grating abruptly felt comfortable expressing this. (tbh I'm surprised it hadn't happened earlier, guy seems like a good egg but I find him pretty obnoxious).
Their dislike, got conflated with the initial hypothesis and at that point you have hundreds of people confused about what's happening and writing up their own rough guesses. Some actual racists began messaging in support of what they interpreted the events as, misrepresenting Ken and others in the process.
About 95% of it is just the general toxicity of Twitter reaching a part of the website that generally avoids it.
I disagree. Stirring up trouble is going fishing for 4chan memes and then attacking normal, non-political people because they used a “OK symbol” which is a completely normal hand symbol in their culture.
As far as the switch from one CoC to another (React already had a CoC since 2017), I’m not sure what difference it makes. A CoC is just a piece of paper, if it’s going to be enforced against people for inoffensive actions, that’s concerning, if it’s only going to be used for common sense (banning people who are mean or trolling) then I have no issue. What happens with a CoC is unknown but I doubt it will have much bad effect as other projects have adopted it and then not needed to do anything.
Amusingly another well known weight lifting React programmer used the 'ok' symbol in its normal context in relation to the scandal and had to apologise immediately.
While we should generally just be nice to each other and we should discourage harassment, this article doesn't seem to present much in the form of evidence of harassment and is mostly tweets of people apologizing for things, and as someone who is not a member of the React community, I'm not sure what for.
I wonder if other industries ever experience the same thing - like a carpenter convention that veers off into an argument about whether the screwdriver community is a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy?
What's the actual instance of prejudice, harassment that is being reported? I saw a lot of very serious accusations in the article (the kind that is capable of ruining a carreer), but no links or screencaps of the actual wrongdoing.
The Mac girl gave a talk about how she doesn’t feel able to contribute well in tech due to people’s implicit biases and existing power systems, some people online pointed the finger at two leaders in the react community as examples of that. Over the weekend, the person who gave the talk experienced a ton of online harassment (par for course for being a woman online unfortunately) and some of the accusers really escalated what they were accusing the react devs of.
I think there is likely good support in the girls original talk, an implicit understanding in JS land that the react community is has some deep bro encoding (bro meaning weightlifting, video games etc, not politics and hatred), and a misunderstanding that a deep bro encoding doesn’t mean you’re alt right trump supporters but it does mean that a “non bro” might have a hard time fitting in and experience relatively more harassment in that community than in others.
She wasn't getting abuse because she was a woman, she was getting abuse because she's a feminist picking fights with all men, and engaging in nasty witch-hunt behaviours. Literally, "men are biased against women even if they say they aren't and even if nobody can prove it".
Men who promote that sort of hard left identity politics get lots of abuse too, which is fair game because it's about their opinions and not their identity.
I am skeptical that the "React community" is a hotbed of white supremacy.
It seems wildly inappropriate to have a talk titled "White supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy" at a software conference. Is there a way to criticize that without being called a white supremacist?
You be the judge. My understanding is that implicit bias tests are controversial among experts [0]. I also think that the talk is extraordinarily inappropriate (given the venue) and I'm not surprised that there was backlash.
As always, the line between "criticism" and "harassment" is blurry. But, again, is there a way to criticize that talk without being labeled a harasser or being accused of "minimizing white supremacy"?
There's little point in trying to avoid being called such things. The term has been redefined to be more encompassing and is used as a political weapon by those with an agenda.
> But, again, is there a way to criticize that talk without being labeled a harasser or being accused of "minimizing white supremacy"?
The technique of labeling your opponent or ascribing some extreme position to your opponent is as old as debating. What Twitter has done is make the technique more effective. Disagree with how antifa does things? You must be a nazi. Dislike Trump? You must be a USA hating communist.
But you can also see this happen in the small scale. Disagree with a business partner about a business idea? You must just want to close down the business.
It's all ridiculous posturing, and unfortunately seems to be used much more today. I also think it provides a smokescreen for when someone really is a nazi or racist.
Who wrote (or said) something about what or which person? Was the indicated talk the target here? Was the person giving the talk the target here? Who was attacked and why?
On the surface that just seemed that the majority of the people contributing to some project (in this case React) are white people which presumably ends up in joining together and dismissing opinions coming from people associated with other groups. Was this the case? Where is the evidence for that? Is / was the discussion completely unrelated to this? Really - I don't get at it all. Maybe a language barrier.
Don't get me wrong - if something like that occurred then a CoC / actions from the project leads must follow, but I just don't see it. Maybe the article is not clear about it.
Someone associated with react gave a speech on white supremacist capitalist patriarchy at a tech conf. Someone said this is a swf topic. People agreed. Orginal speaker cries Racism/male power and has other people back her up. She says she is leaving community. React leader turns off twitter for a few days and comes back with new racism react behaviour code. Most devs just keep thier heads down and keep coding.
Is a little one sided as from the perspective of someone involved but gives a good overview.
Does overlook the fact many of people assumed the person at the center was a trump fanatic which has since been debunked. Not seen any apology or explanation yet.
From reading the article, is the issue a React conference presenter showed a slide with "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy", and people tweeting about that negatively are seen as evidence of white supremacists, etc in the community?..
I use React and I lift weights (badly), yet this particular drama went by me. The article doesn't clarify matters much, can anyone try to tl;dr the situation in an objective way?
I mean, I just read apologies from people I respect (Ken Wheeler and Dan Abramov) but I'm not sure what they did wrong and the article doesn't really say.
"white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" tech topics at tech conferences are probably not the best venue. Feels a little like false advertising if I expected to learn something about react.
Mac describing the react community as bro-code break things.. male energy as awful and something to be changed. 90% of the community is male and their energy made the react community what it is today. Exclude them and react has 1% of the market.
So many other programming languages have conferences that focus on the language.. why is react different.
Mac leaving the community sounds strange. What does it mean? She won't use react and will switch to vue? She will never code again (there are other libruaries/languages)
What is a code of conduct for react and how does it affect a normal developer. Can someone still use react or do they need to be vetted first?. Will they change the licease so if someone breaks these rules they will not allow react on any sites they developed?
Whenever events like this happen there is rarely an unbiased account of what was said. I still have no clue what was said by any one of these parties. It would better serve the community at large to be able to interpret their own conclusions from the behavior than read these inflammatory click bait posts.
I’m reminded of the bullshit “dongle” incident from a few years ago.
> Another user, designer and writer Heydon Pickering, tweeted a joke suggesting that users in the React community were obsessed with lifting weights, guns, Trump and free market ideals.
The peculiarly American coalition of political extremists, liars, con artists and mentally ill people wins again, and the longer they keep winning the worse the backlash is going to be when it comes.
Just say no to codes of conduct. Say no to victim-ideology. Say no to politics. And most importantly, say "fuck you" to anyone who dares make the claim that everything is politics.
I always see "both sides" participating in HN comments, but I overwhelmingly see people shooting down CoC's (and similar documents) here as opposed to supporting them. Here's my personal take as someone who is very socially liberal.
I would enjoy living in a world where these sort of documents are not necessary. However, people are absolutely discriminated against in open source projects and these documents aim to alleviate some of those pains. This sort of rule is necessary as an unregulated expectation of kindness isn't working (eg "be excellent to each other").
The prospect of anonymity could help, but cannot be expected. People shouldn't have to hide who they are as a person in order to contribute.
People also make a weird claim that people are more offended by things and I don't see how that's a bad thing. I would prefer society that calls out these intolerances instead of them just dealing with it. If gay people "just dealt with" the adversities they faced then we'd still be persecuting them. Part of "being offended" is being vocal about people doing and saying terrible things in order to put societal pressure on them to change.
There are some legitimate concerns around CoC's and the like, but the people protesting them aren't attempting to help solve those issues, they're doing so to get rid of these rules and maintain the status quo.
Hope this at least exposes some people on the fence to some of the reasons people support CoCs. I can't speak for every socially liberal person but I'll happily engage in some back-and-forth if you disagree with any points I made or just want more information.
> People shouldn't have to hide who they are as a person in order to contribute.
Hiding - no. Compartmentalize - yes. Some topics have nothing to do with others and this should be respected just as much as "who they are". Political views vs code qualit and contribution is like this.
The point is to always apply the proper compartment. If someone is an a*hole in life, but not in work, nobody should approach the problem from the work angle.
>unregulated expectation of kindness isn't working
What if part of the problem is expecting kindness? Different geographic and work contexts have different kindness levels. But when everyone knows what the baseline is, it's just that, a baseline. When I hang around my friends that work in the trades, I don't have a subjectively worse experience because they bust my balls.
This is insane.... attacking Abramov for using an Ok hand? attacking Wheeler for sticking up for react developers when someone implied they were a bunch of tech bro meathead gun toting trump supporters? I'm irritated they even apologized
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- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/21/freebsd_code_of_con...
It's everywhere. The problem is ultra sensitive people from mainly the US.
Being amped up to 11 for a good chunk of your day is definitely not healthy for you, and probably makes you lose sight of the actual problems going on around you.
I may check Twitter once/week, but never post. It's honestly too stressful to try and figure out if what I post can be misinterpreted in some odd way because of the enforced brevity.
Reading some of the responses in this thread, I feel my emotions rising like they used to on twitter. I want to respond to a lot of these comments.
But when I start typing out a response, I take a step back and say to myself, "what the fuck are you doing, man?" You're arguing some micro point on the internet. You're not going to change this person's mind, you're just trying to make a jab to get some karma so you can feel like your viewpoint is at least justified and makes sense to other people."
Then I realize what a dumb waste of time this is - I already know that my viewpoint isn't all that radical and may people share it. There's no sense in getting upset about this, or trying to assert what I think. I've done it a thousand times before.
So I'm gonna leave this thread and go play some video games instead. Hopefully that isn't too bro-y a thing to do.
The usual assertions without evidence are presented. Bad journalism in my opinion and people I basically view as crazy persons were proved to be correct again. Nice work.
On a more serious tone: this level of "I'm offended by []" is actually becoming counter productive. It's pushing talented, good people, with controversial lifestyle/opinion out of open source, out of the very thing that, in theory, should welcome contributions from anyone as long as it's technically sound and clear. (Related read I found this morning: https://mikkel.hoegh.org/2017/04/18/why-i-care-about-drupal-... )
Can we please go back to the nobody knows you're a dog times with pseudonyms and everything?
EDIT: "nobody knows you're a dog" requires the one behind the pseudonym to stay faceless and the community accept that anyone can be behind a pseudonym and approach the contribution/work/etc without assumptions. It's hard. It's never been properly done, but maybe it's time for this.
It's not uncommon to see arguments that start in disagreement around technical details escalate into full blown ad hominem attacks.
This happened also in the olden days (linux kernel dev comes to mind), and it was never ok.
It's like a stage name, a face, a persona, for a specific purpose. Under that persona one should keep focused on the topic, within the guidelines, etc. but outside they could be their own person.
Simple example: if the current trend continues, soon listening to certain music will become a problem. If someone listens to nordic black metal in their free time, outside of work communities, including online ones, so be it, because it has nothing to do with work communities.
This would require communities to respect and realize the need for this.
Most rap is violently misogynistic and homophobic, that’s another example. I don’t know if anyone was ever ostracised from a tech conference for listening to Eminem though.
Pseudonymity by expectation is akin to requiring everyone to be "in the closet", even if they feel it's important for them not to be.
What political party I belong to (or don't), or what position I hold on a controversial issue will almost never have any bearing on how well I can accomplish a programming task.
What if the people who are being pushed out have been pushing other people out this whole time? People complain a lot about losing talented/high-profile developers because they made parts of the community uncomfortable, but then seem to ignore/minimize the way that person was driving other talented people--often from underrepresented/marginalized groups--away.
People being pushed out are, in many if not most cases those who have a personal life, with personal view on life, which other can't accept, despite the fact that those views and their work are usually well separated from each other.
I know there are a few projects with ~100 people, but I am not aware of anything larger than that which is not what we would expect. So the measures we apply today like CoC's seems to have no effect on how welcoming the industry feels to marginalized people.
So who decides when and where someone may be "pushed out?"
If you're going to war to push out someone, you may well end up pushing out more than just that one person. You become the thing you sought to defeat.
So who is "right?"
However, people have started policing other, non-project forums as well. That, I do not abide. Just because the person that submitted that PR was an absolute racist bigot on twitter a decade ago (or even last night), it has no bearing on the quality of their code. As long as it stays out of their code and their PR.
That assumes that the only important thing about the ecosystem of a project is the code. The code is only going to be useful as long as there are people to continue building and maintaining it. I don't know about you, but I have a difficult time working with racists, regardless of the quality of their code. I'm not willing to overlook something like that just to get some code written.
There are more important things than code.
Racists is such an overloaded term that this means basically nothing. It could mean that you refuse to work with people who burn crosses in black people's yards in which case basically everyone would agree with you, but it could mean that you refuse to work with people who made an ok-sign once without knowing that it had been adopted by white supremacists in which case most people would think you are ridiculous.
When people say that we should leave politics outside of it they mean the second kind.
In more remote open source projects some people advocate for the "everyone is anonymous" variant, in which case they think that nothing matters if the technical parts are good since they wont even know what they do outside of the project. But afaik not a lot of people argue for that in a normal workplace or for conferences.
Completely anonymous systems leads to abuse. This has been demonstrated over and over again.
The most insidious kinds of racism do not involve burning crosses. Obviously just flashing the ok-sign doesn't make you a racist. But society has clearly demonstrated that we are perfectly willing to tolerate the more subtle instances of racism for many reasons. In an environment like that, it's no surprise that the targets of that behavior become incredibly suspicious and distrusting.
The way to solve that problem is not to "leave politics out of it" or to complain that they are too sensitive. The way to solve that problem is to address the underlying problem.
Trying to address the underlying problem of why people has such views is a complex proposition and involves deep discussions based on evidence from neuroendocrinology, primatology, sociology, gender roles, social stratification, historical causes regarding each, and so on. It might very well be impossible if people are not open minded to the idea in the first place.
Why? I'm genuinely curious here. Tangentially, I'm wondering about:
Would you watch a movie made by a racist?
Would you watch a movie starring a racist?
Would you watch a movie where the Key Grip was a racist?
Would you eat a sandwich prepared by a racist?
Would you eat a cucumber grown by a racist?
Would you read a book written by a racist?
Would you read a book edited by a racist?
Would you engage in civil discourse with a racist?
I'm reminded of Steve Irwin. When asked if he minded taking money from unsavory people, he replied he'd take money from any source at all and use it to buy land to conserve it. I view code as the same way- that person is devoting time, a portion of their life, to freely write code for the betterment of all. That is not a free pass to treat people poorly; but if you dig hard enough in anybody's past, you'll probably find something to get upset about. I just think people shouldn't go looking for trouble.
Part of the problem is that the world itself is incredibly complicated, and behaving ethically gets correspondingly complicated because of it (highlighted most excellently in The Good Place).
If you notice, I didn't set a hard rule. I just said, I have a difficult time working with racists. I don't believe that you can set hard rules for any of these things. which leads to another part of the problem: People want simple rules for how they should act, and things that will absolve them of being completely responsible for their actions. These things do not exist, and will never exist.
Everyone is always going to disagree about where the line should be drawn. As a society, we're terrible at managing those differences. We let our egos get in the way too often.
I believe I am not racist, but I still recognize that I can do things that will feel racist to others. In fact, I have done racist things in the past unintentionally. When I was called out on it, instead of letting my ego respond, I listened, and because of that, I became a better person.
If your intention is to be a kind person, then I've found that there generally isn't a problem in handling these things. If your intention is to be able to do what you want without consequences, or to protect your ego, then you're going to have problems.
Is there any actual evidence that ever happens? Citation very much needed.
I read the whole article and there didn’t seem to be any evidence of white supremacy either? Just an assertion that “move fast and break things” is somehow connected and similar other vague statements.
I was about to write that context is critical with all these secret hand signs. Apparently people who think any ok sign is some secret symbol have never watched a basketball game before.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glTOFPECNI
The "instigating event" apparently opened the floodgates of people who felt marginalized and ostracized by the react community. I couldn't really figure out who those people are, and what events/situations they were referring to.
I think it was mostly about women and misogyny after the initial blowout. Though I can't really pinpoint anything.
This is actually quite frustrating as someone looking from the outside - no one is really saying what it's about but everyone is acting as if it's a very big deal.
There may be something there, but outrage can easily become an end in itself.
(I have no dog in this hunt, haven't looked at it at all, it's just a social dynamic that I've seen playing out several times, especially in Twitter pile-ons based on limited or misleading quotes.)
Their dislike, got conflated with the initial hypothesis and at that point you have hundreds of people confused about what's happening and writing up their own rough guesses. Some actual racists began messaging in support of what they interpreted the events as, misrepresenting Ken and others in the process.
About 95% of it is just the general toxicity of Twitter reaching a part of the website that generally avoids it.
- some stuff went down
- people said things they shouldn't have
- end result, react team says: We now have a CoC
If people had been able to behave themselves in a way that was appropriate, we wouldn't be in this situation... but we are, because they couldn't.
Who really cares about who said what and if they meant it?
End result: badness happened. Maybe we can just all move on and get on with doing stuff like, writing code and stuff and stop drumming up more drama?
I'm serious though, this is trolling 101; if you make a fuss about it, and pay lots of attention to it, it makes things worse.
Are you trying to make things worse?
If the answer is no, then don't respond like this, because it's literally just stirring up trouble.
If the answer is yes, then please, do it somewhere else.
As far as the switch from one CoC to another (React already had a CoC since 2017), I’m not sure what difference it makes. A CoC is just a piece of paper, if it’s going to be enforced against people for inoffensive actions, that’s concerning, if it’s only going to be used for common sense (banning people who are mean or trolling) then I have no issue. What happens with a CoC is unknown but I doubt it will have much bad effect as other projects have adopted it and then not needed to do anything.
https://mobile.twitter.com/marcysutton/status/11661472927699...
4chan truly have won in the USA
I think there is likely good support in the girls original talk, an implicit understanding in JS land that the react community is has some deep bro encoding (bro meaning weightlifting, video games etc, not politics and hatred), and a misunderstanding that a deep bro encoding doesn’t mean you’re alt right trump supporters but it does mean that a “non bro” might have a hard time fitting in and experience relatively more harassment in that community than in others.
Men who promote that sort of hard left identity politics get lots of abuse too, which is fair game because it's about their opinions and not their identity.
It seems wildly inappropriate to have a talk titled "White supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy" at a software conference. Is there a way to criticize that without being called a white supremacist?
edit - here's the talk that led to this controversy (I got the title wrong): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQq_gZiZ-jg
You be the judge. My understanding is that implicit bias tests are controversial among experts [0]. I also think that the talk is extraordinarily inappropriate (given the venue) and I'm not surprised that there was backlash.
As always, the line between "criticism" and "harassment" is blurry. But, again, is there a way to criticize that talk without being labeled a harasser or being accused of "minimizing white supremacy"?
[0] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/07-08/psychometric
The technique of labeling your opponent or ascribing some extreme position to your opponent is as old as debating. What Twitter has done is make the technique more effective. Disagree with how antifa does things? You must be a nazi. Dislike Trump? You must be a USA hating communist.
But you can also see this happen in the small scale. Disagree with a business partner about a business idea? You must just want to close down the business.
It's all ridiculous posturing, and unfortunately seems to be used much more today. I also think it provides a smokescreen for when someone really is a nazi or racist.
Who wrote (or said) something about what or which person? Was the indicated talk the target here? Was the person giving the talk the target here? Who was attacked and why?
On the surface that just seemed that the majority of the people contributing to some project (in this case React) are white people which presumably ends up in joining together and dismissing opinions coming from people associated with other groups. Was this the case? Where is the evidence for that? Is / was the discussion completely unrelated to this? Really - I don't get at it all. Maybe a language barrier.
Don't get me wrong - if something like that occurred then a CoC / actions from the project leads must follow, but I just don't see it. Maybe the article is not clear about it.
Thanks for helping me out on this one!
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/cwvbsh/whats_...
I’m curious - on what basis was this speaker given a slot to present this material at a tech conf?
Is a little one sided as from the perspective of someone involved but gives a good overview.
Does overlook the fact many of people assumed the person at the center was a trump fanatic which has since been debunked. Not seen any apology or explanation yet.
https://twitter.com/tesseralis/status/1165124929739620357
I mean, I just read apologies from people I respect (Ken Wheeler and Dan Abramov) but I'm not sure what they did wrong and the article doesn't really say.
"white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" tech topics at tech conferences are probably not the best venue. Feels a little like false advertising if I expected to learn something about react.
Mac describing the react community as bro-code break things.. male energy as awful and something to be changed. 90% of the community is male and their energy made the react community what it is today. Exclude them and react has 1% of the market.
So many other programming languages have conferences that focus on the language.. why is react different.
Mac leaving the community sounds strange. What does it mean? She won't use react and will switch to vue? She will never code again (there are other libruaries/languages)
What is a code of conduct for react and how does it affect a normal developer. Can someone still use react or do they need to be vetted first?. Will they change the licease so if someone breaks these rules they will not allow react on any sites they developed?
I’m reminded of the bullshit “dongle” incident from a few years ago.
...What.
Just say no to codes of conduct. Say no to victim-ideology. Say no to politics. And most importantly, say "fuck you" to anyone who dares make the claim that everything is politics.
I would enjoy living in a world where these sort of documents are not necessary. However, people are absolutely discriminated against in open source projects and these documents aim to alleviate some of those pains. This sort of rule is necessary as an unregulated expectation of kindness isn't working (eg "be excellent to each other").
The prospect of anonymity could help, but cannot be expected. People shouldn't have to hide who they are as a person in order to contribute.
People also make a weird claim that people are more offended by things and I don't see how that's a bad thing. I would prefer society that calls out these intolerances instead of them just dealing with it. If gay people "just dealt with" the adversities they faced then we'd still be persecuting them. Part of "being offended" is being vocal about people doing and saying terrible things in order to put societal pressure on them to change.
There are some legitimate concerns around CoC's and the like, but the people protesting them aren't attempting to help solve those issues, they're doing so to get rid of these rules and maintain the status quo.
Hope this at least exposes some people on the fence to some of the reasons people support CoCs. I can't speak for every socially liberal person but I'll happily engage in some back-and-forth if you disagree with any points I made or just want more information.
Hiding - no. Compartmentalize - yes. Some topics have nothing to do with others and this should be respected just as much as "who they are". Political views vs code qualit and contribution is like this.
The point is to always apply the proper compartment. If someone is an a*hole in life, but not in work, nobody should approach the problem from the work angle.
What if part of the problem is expecting kindness? Different geographic and work contexts have different kindness levels. But when everyone knows what the baseline is, it's just that, a baseline. When I hang around my friends that work in the trades, I don't have a subjectively worse experience because they bust my balls.