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Comment by merlish | Hacker News Reader

Felipe, I'm completely unsurprised you got banned. This post is just continuation of the behaviour you can't see.

People are human. It doesn't matter if you're technically in the right, or that you think things should be some way - if you piss people off, they are going to tell you to stop pissing them off and then eventually they will do something rash.

In this post you just drag out the dirty laundry again and go through it painstakingly, and then post it to a public forum (HN) for everyone to see.

Just learn to let things go, for God's sake. You wouldn't have been banned if you just said 'sorry' or 'ok, let's agree to disagree' and started talking constructively.

Your goal is to talk them round to your point of view, not make them never want to talk to you again for fear of you blowing things way out of proportion.

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Sure, humans can react rash when emotions get involved; that's an explanation of what happened, NOT an excuse. I would hope that someone with power in such a big OSS project would have the self control to not act on his emotions and work off of objective facts instead.

He was talking constructively, up until the point where the admin go pissy in a way that made it impossible to be constructive.

He wasn't. He was acting the part of a self-entitle, self-centered know-it-all. Hell, if he held himself to his own standards, he'd have called himself out for being a hypocritical liar.

Supporting having user's feedback in a project is self-centered?

Not at all, and I didn't even remotely suggest as such. Supporting having user's feedback is an idea. Acting self-centered is the way you act, your attitude. One has nothing to do with the other.

Ah all I have read is the comments and the post. Based on that he did not come off that way to me. Though there is always more to stories.

I didn't act self-centered, I acted as if what I said was true, and I still believe it is.

If you say; I've never tried X, but it sucks. I'm pretty certain that's speculation, because you've never tried it, and that's exactly what I told GNOME developers.

It's speculation, and I'm pretty certain about it, that's why I acted so certain. What's wrong about acting so certain, when you are?

"Your goal is to talk them round to your point of view, not make them never want to talk to you again for fear of you blowing things way out of proportion."

I'd like to think that one's goal is to improve any ecosystem/community and talking them round to your point of view could be one of them. I say this because of one of many things: you _could_ be wrong, the community isn't ready to accept the idea, etc. If you're facing a lot of resistance, it never hurts to back off and reassess, because although you possess the knowledge and insight into how to make things better, it is probably your job as well to make sure everybody knows in the most efficient way possible.

And yes, I agree, scaring colleagues/peers off is never a good thing.

Felipe is obviously an aggressive dude. However, the only difference between him and whoever banned him and all those that refuse to even read his defence is the access to ban mechanisms.

All through the discussion, no participant managed to steer the discussion onto productive grounds. Heated arguments are important to produce good results. It comes a time, in any of these arguments, that the discussion must stop being divergent and start being convergent towards a goal. This step never happened.

If heated arguments never get resolved in the Gnome community, Gnome has a big, big problem. Worse, it will go unnoticed by those in the community because they are filtering out dissonant voices.

IMO if you are in charge of handling users in a community you shouldn't be taking down people due to ifference of opinion of even people you just don't like... If it is your own personal project, sure, but otherwise it should take something more then a few heated words (which personally I didn't find heated at all..) to be banned from something. Reading the post I felt that the admin was acting more childish.

Whatever happened outside bugzilla should have stayed outside bugzilla. In GNOME's bugzilla I always provided value, and to ban me because of a couple of comments that have nothing wrong is overkill.

Do you think it would be fair if a judge ordered jail time because you didn't clean the dishes? No. Domestic issues are domestic issues, and criminal issues are criminal issues.

But good riddance, I'm better served helping projects that don't ban a person just because (s)he has a different opinion. Like Linux, and Git.

No but would it be reasonable to be fired from a job if one was causing inconvenience to their higher-ups elsewhere so much that they didn't want to work with you? Probably.

Edit: not saying I think you should have been banned for this because frankly, I think you were right to begin with, just pointing out that your legality comparisons are not always reasonable.

Maybe, but it would be illegal. Just like it would be illegal to send me to jail in Mexico, for something I did in Turkey.

It would not be illegal in many countries/states for both the job and jail scenarios depending on what crime you had committed.

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