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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

How do they make that work, you think? Could you say a bit more?

One weirdo can severely mess up group dynamics, which is deadly for a small nascent club-type thing.

What if you have someone join who's ferociously intelligent, and not outright evil but just inherently socially maladjusted? You just kick em out if they can't help themselves to continuous "well actually"s, even though they mean well? That in itself might create drama...

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In talking about how they manage to keep it so drama / toxicity free with other alums all we can ever really do is speculate. But people being asked to leave seems to be very rare so we've often concluded it must be in the admissions process. Admissions interviews sound like they are very different experiences for different people but I know that in mine at least there were moments where I could have responded with toxic behavior but didn't. At the very least it seems like any pair programming interview gives ample opportunities to accidentally violate those rules so they might be naturally selecting folks who already organically follow those rules rather than having to artificially conform to them. All speculative though who knows.

Anyway to actually answer your question I think that unfortunately asking people to leave is the mechanism by which they enforce those rules after a few attempts to course correct. I believe I heard stories about that happening but didn't witness it personally and it seemed clear that they weren't interested in broadcasting those instances to the larger community.

Overall, not arguing over the minutia of the rules probably is the best way to do this. I liked the way ggerganov just ended the anti-jt PR drama that started on llama.cpp by banning both participants. Sometimes if you just stop things, they go somewhere else and that's life.

Basically, I take that as a simple mix of "don't feed the trolls" and "we don't behave like that here". Sounds pretty pragmatic and enforceable, in fact. Thanks.

It’s funny because going back to that discussion, people thought it was heavy handed but I agree with you. I hadn’t even heard about this drama, so I think it worked.

Any public school teacher should have some good advice on this one. Clubs have a lot more leeway on solutions!

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