I saw this Twitter thread today from Helen Hou-Sandi and thought, well, we should all try hard not to be this guy.
It's not like I didn't know what I was getting into but I've reached the point where I feel exhausted making myself available to an enormous open source community only to have motives assigned to me by people who've never bothered to actually address me directly.
— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) April 4, 2018
A distributed software project trying to directly compete with services is a terrible idea. Are we learning from successes of others that can make a positive impact on our own project goals? Absolutely. It would be ridiculous to ignore them. Is it to chase their users? Nah.
— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) April 4, 2018
I'm always working on being more gracious in the face of critical feedback, *especially* the negatively expressed parts. I absolutely complain about it (like right now!), but I try not to assume cause or intent on anybody's part or ignore the underlying material.
— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) April 4, 2018
Oh and P.S. I have an unfortunately long memory for usernames, I remember that guy as saying it was "telling" that a WP lead (me) would publish a post on Medium with asking me about it. How would I know what we're allegedly competing with if I never use their tools? 🙃
— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) April 4, 2018
I’ve recently begun dipping my foot back into making Open Source contributions. Its not (quite) as joyless as actual politics, but I do have to be honest and say, all of us can do way better at how we approach confrontation. Really, there should be very few or no confrontations at all.
But there are.
Heaps of ad hominem attacks, which lead to a lot of defensive behaviour, and actually talented people turning their back on the politics of it all. To the detriment of the community at large.
Try harder not to be this guy.
