We all crave human interaction, especially when it sometimes becomes scarce like in the past couple years. And when we can't get our dopamine hits ...
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Good read! You forgot "Sending Calendy invitations".
This is both a hilarious comment, so kudos — but just for the sake of this post — could also be an example of a type of toxic behavior which I think is probably more about Twitter's algorithms than anything the community can change on its own— but effectively I think one type of toxic behavior is the "pile on", or the endless "dunk".
Basically — one person had a really awful take, which people were right to disagree with, perhaps right to make fun of (given it's the Internet, can't take that away), but the level of piling on and dunking was kind of absurd.
It's like — maybe that person deserves a bunch of feedback — but tens of thousands of people yelling at them the right amount?
This is a tragedy of scale more than any one toxic individual (though I'm sure this wasn't without that). IMO Twitter really needs to get a handle on the way they help virally promote "dunkable" moments.
Agree, original comment was funny and I appreciated the joke, like you.
But you make a good point. Twitter allows for certain mistakes to get way overblown. I feel bad for people who go through that, even if they expressed a terrible opinion originally. We need more grace and forgiveness in this vicious world of social media. We need to just be nicer to each other.
I've stayed away from Twitter but now that I work in DevRel, I've made an account and I like that I am aware of these Calendy-type current events, but I'm also disappointed on a daily basis by some of the outright condescending and toxic discussion on there.
This is a really excellent post. So well written, and so true. Nobody is perfect, and you're not asking us to be, but you're reminding us that we need to keep each other's feelings in mind. We need to be a little nicer.
The dismissing others' experience one really spoke to me. Senior devs (in my experience when I was a junior dev) sometimes will say to juniors who are excited about new frameworks or tools, "Oh that's just like blah blah blah..." (some tool used back some number of years ago or "none of this is new, we're all just doing the same thing we've always done". I don't agree with that statement and it always made me a little sad. We may recycle some ideas as devs but we are always working towards doing better, building better, and evolving the technology, even if we go back to things that worked well before (perhaps now I am dismissing their experiences, oops! Better reread the article.).
Yeah it can definitely go both ways! I've seen it happen a lot around single-page web apps for example: one group is like "Rails and jQuery worked great, we don't need any of this Redux-React crap!" while forgetting why the SPA pattern emerged in the first place; while the other group goes deeper and deeper in their rabbit hole without acknowledging the increased complexity.
Interestingly enough I feel like with this specific example we're kinda starting to go full circle with tools like Remix or Astro that try and learn the lessons from both groups and build something even better.
It's always a worthy endeavor to try and be better.
Great article.
In some developer communities, I did encounter entitlement, discrimination, misinformation, bias and some really mean folks.
And coding-related subreddits are one of the most toxic communities I've ever seen.
But focusing on the negative parts will drain your energy and make you cynical about life.
One possible source of toxicity might be corporate culture. I experienced many developers would love to develop their own solutions or at least choose which tool to use, but someone else already decided they must use framework X with bundler Y. Starting sceptical, turning frustrated after checking out open issues and seeing their Stackoverflow questions being deleted before anyone could answer.
It's still wrong to act negatively against the creators and community but the root cause of that toxic energy happened long before engaging in the community, and just shutting up and using another solution is not an option for many employees.
After becoming guilty myself, as a "hater" of Webpack, React, and CSS-in-JS, I quit corporate culture to become a self employed developer and decline every inquiry for React developers ever since, happy to find out what's possible with Vue, vanilla JS and modern (S)CSS.
I also created a devRant account, so hopefully my contributions to DEV and GitHub have become positive and grateful again.
Yes I think you're right, when you transpose the behaviors of corporate culture (venting at the water cooler, feeling oppressed by the hierarchy, etc.) to the online space it often doesn't quite work and becomes toxic.
I think polarising and toxic posts also garner more reactions and are therefore more self-selecting? (think the loud minority)
on the other hand, I'm grateful that people on this platform have generally been awesome
This was a very good read.
We need more posts like these to keep reminding us how to be better.
So true 😁 it's really good to think about our behaviour in open source community. Specially when answering someone's question that looks dumb.
Sometimes people say "sorry for my dumb question"
In my opinion , every question , at any context and at any time , has value because not everyone are the same 😁
Brilliant post!
I often notice that some people have a terrible inability to think outside their own box. They tacitly assume that everyone has the same task to solve as they do. So, they tell you, a Corvette is a bad car, because you cannot buy a roof rack and a trailer hitch.
To be fair, Foo.js is often an inferior implementation of an old idea. I’m not sure if it’s the lowered barrier to entry, but JS developers seem to have collectively short memories. I’m expecting to see a mainframe.js any day now.
“Calling it out” is definitely inappropriate, but there is a conversation to be had about what exactly we want to achieve.
(No hate, my whole career is built on JS :) )
If you'd know how much I ignore TOXIC people on #php topics?
Yeah, the guys they are ask for ask a question are missing. :)
Good article; always good to remind others that people are humans and should be treated as so...redundant but sadly forgotten at times.
Thank you for the article! A very relevant topic! I often encounter this. I agree with you and try to comment correctly :)