Tom Raftery
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2014–2023
18:03 · 5.7K views · Feb 20, 2012
Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.
Cited as the go-to evidence that rudeness drives contributors away and that toxic people must be removed from projects.
5 comments from Hacker News
The glibc team are great people to work with; I managed to get a patch into this release which had been point blank refused by Ulrich Drepper when he was maintainer, and they were incredibly helpful and the process was really easy. So get your fixes in - glibc is becoming much more standards compliant. Assholes will ruin your project[1], you need to get rid of them, whether it is open source or not. [1] this video
Good call. A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" this video
> I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is all I have. It's hard to get "hard evidence" for these kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"[1] from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and other projects. I'm not sure if it's easy to get these kind of numbers from e.g. Slack or Reddit though. [1]: [LINK] / this video > total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously. It wasn't the first time he was banned, but I'm not privy to the exact details on this. Was total "total exile" proportional? I don't know: obviously I didn't see everything. I just wanted to say he didn't "just" get banned over a minor thing, but after many years of problematic behaviour that had been raised plenty of times.
Even though bad faith criticism and complaints can be useful, I find there is a still an insurmountable problem sometimes: it can be too time- and energy-consuming to handle the sheer quantity and/or intensity. Sometimes, especially at "political moments" (like elections in a project I was involved in recently - and I wasn't even a candidate), it can feel like being overwhelmed by a tidal wave. If I only have 1 spare hour per day for a project, there is neither time nor emotional energy to handle emails that are so full of demanding questions that it would take 3 hours to process carefully and reply carefully. And if you don't reply carefully, they send you more, writing longer and getting more obsessive (and sometimes personal) as if they sense you'll engage them in a long conversation, so being careful in the first place is a net win. Even if it only took 1 hour, that's still used up all the time I was going to use on other productive things, the "real work". I am in awe of maintainers who seem to reply to an onslaught of demanding questioners, and somehow satisfy them. For me, these are relevant: "Assholes are Killing Your Project" (Donnie Berkholz) [LINK] this video
Exactly . You have to pick: either the jerks, or the people who the jerks drive away. And that doesn't take into account the people who aren't quite driven away but find work that much more unpleasant as a result. If you encounter many skilled jerks, consider why that might be, and why in the same environment you don't also encounter skilled people who are fun to work with. In such an environment, the skilled people who are fun to work with can afford to leave, while some of the non-skilled people may not have that option. So, it's natural that within such an environment (company, project, etc), it'll look like a correlation between jerkiness and skill. People then start assuming a causation, and thus contribute to that same cycle. The opposite environment, with many skilled people who are fun to work with, will tend to reject jerks regardless of skill. I've also noticed that such an environment tends to have a much higher degree of mentorship and collaboration, in addition to being more fun to work in, and boosting energy rather than draining it. See also this video and [LINK] .