How not to ban a prolific Git developer | Hacker News Reader

How not to ban a prolific Git developer

felipec.wordpress.com

Right or wrong the longer a list of grievances is the more a person looks like a professional victim.

A rational tone doesn’t help because some of the worst trolls stay unemotional and try to get other people to lose their shit.

It's the PLC which listed those ten emails as a basis of their grievances with Contreras. Contreras disputes the validity that claimed grievance.

But you seem to imply that Contreras, not the PLC, might be the one possibly viewed as a "professional victim", because you said "a person" and not "an organization."

Doesn't your observation apply more strongly to the PLC?

If the PLC pointed to 100 emails, and Contreras responded to all of them, then is that worse for Contreras? Or worse for the PLC? (Clearly it depends on if you accept the presented information. But "right or wrong" means you're only looking at the length of the list.)

If the PLC pointed to 100 emails, and Contreras responded to 10 of them, then wouldn't the easy interpretation be that the other 90 were justified? (Ie, the 'Gish Gallop' mentioned twice.)

As to your second sentence, unfortunately an irrational or emotional tone also doesn't seem to help. I wouldn't put it past people to claim that's evidence of being a professional victim playing to readers' emotions.

I would probably say the same thing about the people on the other side.

They are not going to solve their problems unless they generating this kind of communication. Fork, if need be.

Unpacking this kind of communication to understand all the details enough to have a confident sense of which one is right if there is a right one is difficult so almost everyone will use a ‘low information’ analysis of the situation which is that they are all wrong.

The ‘low information’ analysis you outlined seems so error-prone that I don't think it should be part of anyone's toolbox.

It's a good heuristic to hit the "flag" button and let some other forum experience the hate.

It's also ends up being a good heuristic for tacitly supporting secret institutional power.

Yes, but if you have ten bugs you don't have time to analyze correctly you don't attempt to fix all ten poorly.

You pick the most important one and analyze it at depth.

What you want is to pick the most egregious alleged violation and explore it at depth so that it can be prosecuted correctly, defended correctly, and judged correctly.

You don't put ten allegations on the docket and then say "we don't have time for the defense, so guilty on all counts".

I don't think somebody dragged to court for ten accusations of crimes can be considered a "professional victim".

I did not choose to make this a thing, it was a thing even before I was notified of the verdict.

Personally I don't see the need to make this a thing and involve the PLC. If Elijah Newren had a problem with me, he could simply ask me "please don't contact me in the next three months" and I would gladly do that.

Enforcement should be necessary only after other methods of agreement have failed. But Elijah never attempted to contact me, and the PLC did no attempt to do any mediation.

One day I was simply notified: this is your punishment. And that's that.

>an email from Git’s Project Leadership Committee

Ah, the poisonous administrative busywork doing nothing departments infecting developement projects...

The "doing nothing" department consisting out of Nr 1, 2, 6 and 12 of the most active git contributors?

Are they active contributors as part of that department - or despite also being there?

My understanding is that that department has contributed 0 lines of code. Correct me if you have better numbers...

The task of the leadership committee isn't writing code, so that's a pretty useless metric to evaluate it against unless you can't imagine anything worth doing in open-source that isn't code. That it's formed from active contributors is important though, because it means they don't need to make "busywork" to be relevant.

The fact that you are good at writing or reviewing code doesn't mean you are a good judge or moderator.

>an email from Git’s Project Leadership Committee

Ah, the busywork doing nothing part of the project...

As if Open Source development didn't have enough self-inflicted wounds and needed more...

Cases like these were predictable when many demanded a COC. Especially the focus on sexism and racism is proof to me that some people wanted to build a profile instead of contributing constructively.

The author engaged in policing others himself. Perhaps a lesson? It will become a problem if code is hosted exclusively on Github.

Not many demanded a CoC. In fact then the CoC was proposed it as merely as a "just in case" proposal that others agreed was not needed at that particular point in time because the community was "relatively calm".

And I didn't engage in tone policing myself. I'm perfectly fine with people disagreeing with each other using whatever tone they'd like.

Fair enough. I think the problems that demanded a COC were artificially constructed. I do think that the committees are a severe negative influence on the community though.

There was a rough tone at some point, but that is what you get if people are passionate and in disagreement. A corporate COC can kill any passion instantly and isn't a solution.

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