The Jigar Kumar nudges are so incredibly rude. I would have banned the account, but perhaps they contributed something positive as well that isn't mentioned.
I wonder if it would be possible to crowdsource FOSS mailing list moderation.
There is a good chance that everyone in that thread except the original maintainer is in on the act. It's likely that all those accounts are managed by a single person or group. Targeting just one account for rudeness isn't going to help, if that's true.
The mechanism employed here seems like the good cop, bad cop interrogation/negotiation technique. There is the one person who has taken care to show cultural and mission alignment. Then there are several misaligned actors applying pressure which the first person can relieve.
It does help on the social/psychological side. If you, as an open source project maintainer, have a policy that such rudeness is not acceptable, you are much less likely to become a successful victim of a social attack like this.
It's entirely possible for an evildoer to make someone feel bad while remaining completely polite.
First send a message to the mailing list as "Alice" providing a detailed bug report for a real bug, and a flawless patch to fix it.
Then you reply to the mailing list as "Bob" agreeing that it's a bug, thanking "Alice" for the patch and the time she spent producing such a detailed bug report, then explaining that unfortunately it won't be merged any time soon, then apologising and saying you know how frustrating it must be for Alice.
Your two characters have been model citizens: Alice has contributed a good quality bug report, and code. Bob has helped the project by confirming bug reports, and has never been rude or critical - merely straightforward, realistic and a bit overly polite.
As someone else said in this thread, scammers are often rude, because it makes people act fast, polite responses give them time to think. Of course, people are very easily manipulated. But by completely rejecting rudeness and having the mindset to not let others put pressure on me, you will improve the odds by a lot.
That would be true if you could ban the person from using new emails, but I don't think that's true when the thread if rife with sock puppet accounts. You ban the first rude email account, then there will be 2 new accounts complaining about both the lack of commits and the "heavy-handed mailing-list moderation" stifling differing views.
Yep, as the attacker you bias the entire playing field to your side. If a mailing list has 20 or so users on it, you create 50 accounts over time that are nice, helpful, and set a good tone. Then later you come in with your attack and the pushy assholes. Suddenly those 50 puppets just slightly side with the asshole. Most people break under that kind of social pressure and cave to the jerks request.
Absolutely right. Considering there is a whole cottage industry about asshole replies from Linus Torvalds on linux mailing lists.
For lesser/individual maintainers there is no way to survive this kind of mob attack. Corporate maintainers may be able to manage as it could be considered just as paid job and there are worse ways to make money.
The act relies on there being an extreme reluctance to ban. Once the banhammer has been used, the act kind of falls apart. Of course, difference pressure campaigns can then be brought to bear.
We live in an adversarial environment, time to stop playing naively nice. Ideally it isn't the maintainer that has to do all this work.
Yeah, same. We should be much more willing to kick jerks out of our work spaces. The work is hard enough as it is without also being shit on while you do it.
Yea people are too accepting of allowing asshats like the Jigar messages.
Simple ban and get the fuck out. Too often I've dealt with people trying to rationalize it as much as "o its just cultural, they don't understand". No, get the fuck out.
But hey I'm a NYer and telling people to fuck off is a past time.
Jigar was the same person/group as Jia. They were the bad cop and Jia was the good cop. Banning wouldn't have changed anything. Even if Jigar had been banned, the maintainer would still have appreciated the good cop's helpful contributions in contrast to the unhelpful bad cop. Jia would have become a maintainer anyway.
Not surprising, unfortunately. You'd think malicious actors would be nice to people they're trying to deceive. But after watching a few Kitboga videos, I learned that they more often yell, abuse, and swear at their victims instead.
Being mean is stressful and stops your brain from working properly. If someone doesn't allow you to be abusive, then they are not a mark. Predators look for prey that falls into certain patterns.
>I wonder if it would be possible to crowdsource FOSS mailing list moderation.
I think this could be a genuine use of an AI: to go through all of the shit, and have it summarized in a fashion that the user wants: distant and objective, friendly, etc. It could provide an assessment on the general tone, aggregate the differently phrased requests, many things like that.
Crowdsourcing would works best with the reddit / hacker news model I feel, where discussion happens in tree styled threads, and users can react to messages in ways that are not text, but something meta, like a vote or a reaction indicating tone.
Both of these have significant downsides, but significant upsides too. People pick the mailing list in a similar way.
A big problem is that people allow this sort of thing as part of the culture. I've followed the Fedora and PHP development mailing lists a few different times over the years ans this sort of thing was tolerated across the board. It doesn't matter if you crowdsource the moderation if nobody thinks the behavior is bad in the first place.
Trying to do something about it was called censorship.
The premise of the post I replied to is that the mailing list moderation is currently not great and that it allows people to be abusive. It suggest that we should crowdsource this moderation. I assume they think this will lower the burden.
I myself do not think that this is the actual problem. I think the actual problem is that many FOSS communities have fostered an idea that cracking down on certain types of behavior is censorship. Of course they might all agree to ban somebody who is saying certain well known explicit words or being really really aggressive, but there's a lot of behavior that I would consider bannable but they do not.
I'm trying to avoid mentioning specific cases because I don't wanna either reopen old wounds or cause another similar dustup. I can say that it reminds me a lot of the really old post about the 5 geek social fallacies https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/ In particular social fallacy #1
Obviously we're not talking about geek culture here (in general anyways). After rereading it, I saw something else that we actually do a see a lot even today.
This in particular has happened on many a mailing list, including the ones I'm not specifically mentioning
>> <SNIP> when nothing smacking of social selectiveness can be discussed in public, people inevitably begin to organize activities in secret. </SNIP>
Well-known annoyances get tolerated for years, and the people who do the work start moving their discussions to bug trackers, irc, or in personal emails to avoid interacting with them.
I agree with this. In group settings I also look out for group-destructive behavior, and address it as best as I can. I'm the kind of person who thinks that certain rules, while restrictive on the surface, enable a sort of sustainable freedom down the line, similar to how the GPL license works.
I wonder if it would be possible to crowdsource FOSS mailing list moderation.