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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

You would probably see people using it any time a lot of people feel alienated by the behavior.

Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).

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I appreciate your earnest engagement here.

I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.

It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?

Practically speaking I don't think it's less loaded, for example if someone working on something decides suddenly that they're switching license to GPL, that has historically caused problems for BSD in the past (more than once).

It's really difficult to continue this conversation if you view the concept of justice to be alienating, what is open source if not a means to deliver code to large groups of people who would otherwise be alienated from working with that code? I don't understand. If you're not interested to help customers and be fair and just to them, I would think you would have a hard time working at any company. What is your real goal?

I view cliques as alienating, like I said above. Of course I'm for 'justice', but it's such a fuzzy word that people can have different views of what is just.

If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?

Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.

>the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.

To me that it always the problem that has faced any minority groups anywhere -- it's never obvious to the majority what the alienating behavior is. So they have to painstakingly explain it, and of course some of them will always get accused of overreacting and attacking the majority. What else can be done?

I suppose we'll have to take it case by case. Sometimes someone was wronged, but much more frequently, they wanted their politics agreed to 100% and someone had a slightly different worldview, let's try to get them fired.

There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.

Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.

I personally wouldn't take these incidents on twitter as indicative of anything, there is quite a lot of information missing there. You or I probably don't know the full history of the company or what transpired for it to get to that point, only the people who experienced it firsthand really know that. Social media is its own community that is really good at turning things outside itself into polarization and outrage, it's not what a community manager for some open source project would usually turn towards in order to solve problems within a community. Leave twitter's problems to twitter.

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