Having worked in the open for over 20 years I've conversed with people from all over the world and all different walks of life.
Recently I've noticed something troubling. Now this probably won't come as a surprise to many, but lately I've been running into people that just can't seem to understand that the experiences of others can be different than their own.
I know respect for multiple perspectives is hard, but the issues seem to have even grown to include simple mundane things about life where people can't look outside of their immediate surroundings.
The other night while watching a Twitch.tv stream, we (chat) got into a discussion about starting vegetable seedlings before planting them in a garden. One chatter said something along the lines of
lol you should have started that months ago.
I responded with
We're clearly in different hardiness zones as I'm still about 8 weeks out from the last freeze. Hell it even snowed yesterday...
The chatter then responded with something like
Oh yeah, I'm in Florida, we don't get frost.
Based on their initial response I knew that something like this response was coming because this has become a typical interaction for me.
I know I'm probably over analyzing this as I'm writing a blog post about it, but the original response comes off as disrespectful, elitist, and completely lacking in humility.
I have interactions like this all the time and I honestly don't understand why. Someone will just blurt out something that's obviously subjective, with a high level of confidence, and in some cases will even try to mock the person they're responding to.
I don't know if it's some statistical anomaly or what, but people do this to me constantly. In the official Pidgin channels, my own Twitch streams, random chats, forums, wherever. People refuse to acknowledge my reasoning, see it as an attack against them, and then start rambling nonsense at me. It's gotten totally out of control.
Unfortunately When I've tried to confront this behavior, no matter how gentle I try to be, it's almost always seen as an attack against the other person. This is very ironic as typically they're the ones being rude and obtuse in the first place.
A common example of this is that someone will mention that "Pidgin isn't a good IRC client". That is their opinion and I have no issue with that, but as the project maintainer, I would REALLY like to know what we can do better.
Unfortunately these discussions tend to devolve extremely quickly. People feel like I'm putting them on the spot and become defensive no matter how sensitive I try to be.
I've seriously had people and observers think I was interrogating someone when I was using phrases like "I'd to hear your thoughts" or "could you be more specific?".
I've spent a lot of time reflecting on these discussions and the only thing I've been able to come up with is that it appears that people just like to be rude. So much so, that they'll only remember that they didn't like something, and completely forget what they didn't like about it.
Another example was in the exact same Twitch stream mentioned above. I mentioned that I was setting up a new build agent for Pidgin based on a Raspberry Pi 5 using an m.2 SATA drive.
Apparently that wasn't enough of a reason for people as the discussion immediately devolved into the typical "you can get a more powerful x86 machine for just as much" and so on.
Whether or not that is true depends on your own personal situation. However, the point I'm trying to make is that my personal reasoning for my choices were completely ignored while the discussion pivoted into a meta discussion driven by elitism.
On the plus side, I wasn't directly involved in the discussion anymore, but I still accidentally kicked it off, because surprise, people seem to have some very strong feelings about Raspberry Pis and feel the need to tell you all about them whether you want to hear them or not.
The reasons someone may be using a Raspberry PI is quite frankly, none of your business, and their mention of it is not an invitation for someone to start preaching to them. Perhaps the Raspberry PI was was a gift or a hand me down from a mentor to a new enthusiast who couldn't afford one. In that case, and many others, the price difference is completely irrelevant and you're just making yourself look bad by being rude and pedantic.
As I mentioned earlier, this scenario happens to me all the time. This is precisely why I refuse to discuss why we don't use Git or GitHub for Pidgin.
No matter what reasoning or data I provide, it won't be enough for defenders of the monoculture. This group tends to think that there is one correct way to do things and everything else is empirically wrong and deserves immediate debate.
There's a similar group that will try to bait you into these debates with prompts like "I'm curious why you use ". For some reason they believe they deserve an explanation and will get indignant if you don't give it to them immediately.
Both of these groups are more interested in proving that their narrow focus is correct. They will ignore anything to the contrary and expect you to stop what you're doing and defend your stance immediately and attempt to sway their opinion, which can not be done. Many of them will also try to continue the discussion when you try to walk away. They're not interested in understanding, just their correctness and their ability to assert it.
As you might imagine, this is not only extremely exhausting and unproductive, it's also extremely hostile. No one wants to have to defend their choices constantly. Many people will write a blog post explaining their stance and point people to it like I'm doing now, but that has its own set of problems.
Many people have asked me to write a blog post on my preference of Mercurial over Git and so far I've refused and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
I already know what the comments section will be like. I see it in trivial discussions like those mentioned above and I've seen it in this specific case too many times to count. I already know what the Hacker News and lobste.rs comment sections will look like because this topic has been rehashed so many times.
Nothing productive ever comes out of it and no one's "curiosity" is ever satisfied. Maybe a few people learn about some alternatives, but the only thing stopping them from even looking for them in the first place is the status quo of the monoculture.
More importantly, there is nothing for me personally to gain here. My choices are made from my own opinions which are based on my own experiences. Even if someone were to gain some insight from my description, they can't necessarily act on it due to the incompatibility of Git and Mercurial and the monoculture around Git will continue to enforce that until a new contender appears.
If you've ever had a discussion with me that sounds like what I've described here, there's a good chance I ended up avoiding responding to you, timed you out, or banned you. Hopefully this post helps to explain why that happens.
Likewise, if you've ever seen me quietly disappear from a community it's most likely because I reached my limit of dealing with interactions like this.
I try to do my best to be understanding of cultural differences and translation issues that occur when interacting with individuals where English is a second language, but eventually my patience will run out and the only thing left that I can do is to leave.
Top comments (11)
In many of these situations, I think a strong factor is that the tone is not well communicated in text. For instance, I could easily imagine someone saying "I'd to hear your thoughts" in a tone that makes it sound like "Oh yeah? Well, do it better yourself or shut up!" In their world, you were the one that started the hostility.
Another factor is the anonymity in these situations. It's much easier to act rude/honest when you don't have other peoples eyes on you, which is natural. Because let's be honest, there are things we don't do because of risk of being viewed as a bad person by others. Sure, I would not murder people if I got away with it, but not being anonymous does put some limits on my behavior. It's a part of human nature.
A third thing is that I believe most people occasionally act how you describe it. That's why it seems to be so many of them. I can definitely recall discussions where I have gotten tunnel vision. I'm not proud of it, but it has happened. But unfortunately, these are the things we remember. It's a sort of confirmation bias.
I imagine that these things are statistically more common among programmers for a simple reason. Autism is over represented among programmers. I'm not personally diagnosed, but I would not be surprised if I have it to a small degree.
I totally understand if you get fed up with it. And I don't have a good solution. I usually try to assume best intentions. Sometimes I end the discussion with something like "With all respect, I can give brief explanations to my choices if you're curious. However, I'm not really interested in a debate. If you prefer git, good for you. I just happen to disagree."
One suggestions. I guess that you have a few friends in these communities where these discussions arise. Ask them to explain why you're getting silent. No idea if it's a good solution or not.
Take care <3
You will not stop people to show the world, how narrowminded they are.
Not related to the post, just to share my surprise that Pidgin still exists - I used this fella in 2004 on my company's intranet 👴🏼
Yep we're still here working towards finally getting Pidgin 3 out the door.
One way you could try to approach it, for instance when it comes to write a post about why you prefer Mercurial, is to remember that for every person who comes with one of those narrow minded comments, there are probably hundred silent readers who finds the post interesting and valuable. Most people are perfectly satisfied with reading without commenting.
Also, by nature, people are more likely to comment when they don't agree. Because if they agree, what's there to say? So for every single person who writes a negative comment there are ten who didn't write simply because they agree with you.
That sounds a lot like hearsay... But like I said in the post, there's nothing for me to gain in writing that post. Helping silent people as I deal with an onslaught of negativity is not something I'm going to be able to justify to myself.
Well, the numbers are completely made up. They were just there to illustrate. But I think the principle still stands. Go to any youtube video and compare the amount of views to the amount of comments. I would be impressed if you could find any video with at least 1000 views that has at least 200 comments. And even if you could, I guess you would agree that it's very rare?
But sure, ultimately you are the one who has to decide what is best for you and your health. If there's nothing to gain for you, it's of course the correct decision. But I have to admit that I am curious about the answer. :)
Sure, but views aren't everything, popularity is finite as it is a time based. This is something many people, especially in tech seem to forget. Always asking what the "best" tool or method is for everything and then they believe it as dogma.
But always, the best tools are the ones that let you accomplish your goals effectively which is why someone else's opinion on tooling isn't always a great idea because their use case isn't yours.
To be honest I find myself doing that a lot, feeling the need to tell someone on the internet how and why they're wrong (here's the relevant xkcd by the way).
More often than not I'll delete my comment before submitting it, but sometimes I think it's still worth posting because it contributes to the conversation. I mean it might not have been the responses you were expecting when you started talking about planting crops, making a build system on a respberry pi, or using mercurial, but they still made for more interesting conversation than if they had simply replied "ok, cool" and moved on.
Even when chatting with friends on topics we mostly agree on I'll usually play devil's advocate and argue that they're still kinda wrong just for the sake of the argument.
I personally dislike "the sake of argument" arguments... Like if you have a point, cool lets talk about that, but if you're just busting my balls, I'm going to be annoyed that you're wasting my time ;)
"here's THE relevant xkcd" - I love the assumption that there always exist a relevant xkcd, which is often true :)