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Comment by jezze | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of people here complain about their toxic community. This was always the worst thing about suckless and it put a lot of people off about trying to engage and help out, including me. Luckily the most toxic of them all left a few years ago now and the mailing list is now a lot better compared to how it used to be. I'm not on irc anymore so dont know about the conversations happening there but I hope it also has become better. Its interesting how one persons bad influence can throw shade on an entire community. Most of them are really nice.

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It's not just the toxic community. It's also the fact that their opinion of what "sucks less" is quite particular and not shared by many people.

Instead of acknowledging that they're engaged in an interesting, unusual, and important experiment, they just say that everything else sucks. The whole premise of the existence of the group is more or less that most software is written by and for inept rubes.

On the other hand, maybe their exclusionary attitude is what helps keep the interesting, unusual, and important experiment alive. I know a lot of people who really enjoy using dwm, st, dmenu, surf, etc. They are indeed good, non-sucky programs, if you don't mind writing some light-duty C code and recompiling to update your config. Who am I to judge? But you have to acknowledge that this is a very unusual definition of "sucking less".

The premise of their project is something I fully agree with, but I always found it a bit too extreme and opinionated. It's one thing to avoid unnecessary bloat. But going for short code at any cost doesn't seem to be the ideal solution either; now we've got over 100 patches for dwm, created based on the untouched source code of some specific dwm version. The result is a bit of a mess, only worsened by the source code containing almost exclusively 1-2 letter variable names.

Nonetheless I like most suckless projects, especially st and dmenu are fantastic. Even though the push against bloat is more needed on the internet. I'm tired of all the tracking, loading times and memory usage, despite ad blockers.

The premise itself seems as mainstream as it comes: aggrieved and upset at the world. At least these people were/are trying to forge a better path, but to me, it mostly just seems like "the same thing but a bit smaller this time". The overall experience? Fairly close. A little better.

There was some cool 9p roots that were genuinely distinct, but it didn't seem to really take hold strongly across the community.

But yeah, there were allegedly some un-good community members too, and I'd fully believe the community itself has improved a lot.

Creating good software inherently involves some form of exclusion; you need a strategy to exclude bad software. There are fundamentally two families of exclusion strategies that can be used: formal and informal. Formal exclusion is when you exclude bad software through formal constructions, like proof systems. This works great but is expensive. Informal exclusion is when you exclude bad software through social pressure. This works well and is cheap. Any organization that successfully leverages informal exclusion will inevitably be perceived as "toxic" in the modern jargon. If you've been in open source for a while I'm sure you can think of some examples.

It's possible to maintain software quality (or quality of any endeavour) without being rude or making people feel bad.

On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between rude behaviour and high levels of technical quality, nor is there any plausible explanation for such a correlation.

My hunch is that any successful project with a rude atmosphere succeeds in spite of the rudeness.

Reminds me of the "steve jobs effect" at certain points. CEOs and execs purposely being arseholes because greatness. Newton was a bastard. Steve was an ass. Prince was unbearable. If I act like a bastard...

You're really going to group Prince with Newton and Jobs though? lol

My apologies to all three.

Are you really sure it's appropriate to compare Newton and Jobs either?

What you describe is very possible with a group of like minded developers; I think everyone, including those who are perceived as rude on the Internet, prefers that atmosphere.

In practice, however, many open source projects have socially dominant developers who incessantly rewrite everything and introduce bugs until some introvert correctness advocate explodes.

There is no way of dealing nicely with passive aggressive socially dominant people. They just continue their game until someone calls them out directly.

These days, of course, the introvert is canceled and they can carry on.

See the Rust project (the programming language, not the game) for one example of a community which manages to retain a huge focus on software quality while staying professional and inclusive, and not being rude to outsiders. We might even see a development where people will choose to "rewrite their software in Rust" purely as a ploy to attract nice and professional contributors!

Software is a second career for me, and the pervasive hostility of the tech industry has never stopped shocking me. I dream of communities where differences are celebrated, enhancing creative ferment; the tech industry as a whole won't be that way within the foreseeable future, but there can be pockets where tolerance and constructive interaction are norms.

The Rust community is one of them. Regardless of whether it is successful as a recruitment tool, regardless of the effect on productivity, building a kind community is worthwhile just for the sake of its members.

Because life is short, and every hour that we spend enjoying ourselves rather than enveloped by hostility is a treasure.

Do you mind if I ask what your first career was?

I worked in a recording studio for 6 years. It had started as a punk rock shop, but by the time I worked there had grown into a mid-level facility with a diverse clientele; I recorded two koto albums, remastered a Marcel Marceau interview record, did transfers of lost tapes from Cambodian surf rock bands wiped out by the Khmer Rouge... it was day after day of solving hard technical problems with very limited budgets to help individuals achieve their personal artistic visions, and an ongoing celebration of freaks letting their freak flags fly.

I dream of open source software communities with a similar ethos, but they must exist within a vast sea of tech industry assholery and misogyny, and are so easily swamped.

And believe it or not, things are better now than they were in the past. Reading mailing lists and forums from the early 00s is a very uncomfortable experience.

I suspect that being derisive and dismissive is often a coping mechanism for when a person realizes they don't know how to answer a question but doesn't want to admit it.

> I dream of communities where differences are celebrated, enhancing creative ferment

"Difference" is a semantically overloaded word. The kind of differences that are needed to move software forward aren't the kind of superficial differences that might signal creative diversity in other industries, like music, where cultural background is a significant influence on creative output.

Well, not to worry — that dream will not be realized any time soon. There are too many people in today's tech industry who are utterly, adamantly opposed to it and who will strive tirelessly to defeat it.

My heart remains in the independent music industry, not here. The tech industry is a horrible place.

Rust is extremely exclusionary (to non-progressives). The "niceness" is mostly a facade - a lot of the people in the Rust community are extremely passive-aggressive and back-stabby. OTOH, I've contributed to a lot of "rude" projects where they'll treat you with respect and won't try to pull weird bullshit if you actually come in to make a contribution rather than to do political activism or something.

Even if you've never had to interact with them, it's easy to see that social signaling is more important to the rust community than doing good work. Last time I was in the Rust discord, their channel logo was literally the rust logo over a the gay flag with lines for black and brown people added. Wtf?

I've submitted probably >100kloc to various open source projects over my career, and the weird politicking and immature behavior of the Rust community soured me on contributing to the Rust ecosystem almost immediately.

> Last time I was in the Rust discord, their channel logo was literally the rust logo over a the gay flag with lines for black and brown people added. Wtf?

This sort of hateful comment is why the tech industry is a horrible place. Even in the best pockets of the tech industry, like HN, intolerance is treated as a legitimate enough perspective to be worthy of endless debate.

And then people furrow their brows over why tech's demographics are so warped. eye roll

There's no fix, no hope. The tech tradition of "open debate" guarantees an endless supply of comments like this.

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