Vitriol in the Linux community

Just come chill with the big brains in the sysadmin mega.

2 Likes

Big_bran.sh is kicking.

3 Likes

TS was a bit more toxic than this is now, people tended to just keep going on with the discussion and ignoring the shit show and it tended to die out a lot of the time.

Used to read every post on TS and people were more likely to be like “Sir you are wrong” then ignore what ever they replied with and get on with life or reply with a wall of text as to why they were wrong about what was being discussed then ignore their posts and get on with what ever they were doing.

Or Zoltan would leave a 2-10k word wall of text about something and you would have to read the whole damn thing to fully get what he was saying because he would spread it out enough to the point that if you didn’t you were going to miss something and no they couldn’t have just cut it down to 2-3 paragraphs.

Not like the Windows community does any better always going on about 10 is cancer and only good windows is XP or 7 or 98, when the best MS product by far was clearly MS-DOS…

5 Likes

thats it im banning you

5 Likes

How dare you capitalize it.

1 Like

If this is about the Rocket League Thread, I think it’s an over reaction.

Personally I’d always take “toxic” gatekeeping over letting things slack too much

Let the hate flow through you.

2 Likes

This is about a group of mostly negative people in the community who only ever spend their time talking bad about companies and software.

I miss Zoltans walls of text, great bed time reading, I’d fall asleep thinking about all the ways he was wrong and yet right at the same time :^)

1 Like

criticism is how change happens.

As an example… If there wasn’t an uproar about Windows 8, Windows 10 would not have been changed for the better.

if there wasn’t an uproar and minor disaster with bitkeeper, git would never have been invented.

if there wasn’t a colossal disaster with windows XP security, microsoft would not have made major, major changes to SP2 and fixed it.

etc.

shrug

Not everything is perfect. there are a lot of people here who no doubt have a lot of frustration with various companies who make their life way more difficult than things need to be.

I’m not saying “well, 100% negative shitpost then!”.

Just saying that imho you need to take the good with the bad. If everybody is shiny happy 100% positive about everything, even when it is bullshit, then nothing ever gets fixed.

If you’re getting frustrated with the amount of negativity… don’t go seeking it. Go do other stuff, don’t dive into obviously negative threads, etc.

There’s been way, way worse criticism of pretty much everything on the internet going back to the days of usenet.

Forums, or other small communities (all of them) grow and change. If you pine for the days of yore, well… sorry but they’re gone and not coming back. Smaller communities are closer. As an internet site grows, that close-nit-community feeling fades. ALWAYS. Doesn’t matter if it is tech, cars, bikes, gaming, whatever.

it always happens. Without fail.

So, if anyone is feeling personally affected by this sort of thing…

Unplug. take a break. go out into that real world we supposedly “live” in and actually do something enjoyable.

Maybe that’s part of it too. We’re all so much more connected these days, and constantly exposed to this stuff.

Reminder:

Hardware is just melted sand.

Software is just a text file.

And, most FOSS projects were just hobbyist projects someone decided to share.

No company owes you anything and you don’t owe them anything back. They aren’t your friend.

You can live without a computer. We did it for tens of thousands of years.

6 Likes

True, but it depends what type of criticism you are giving out. There’s helpful and unhelpful ways to criticize. “Fuck this and fuck that” and attacking the person instead of the idea won’t help the situation. This thread is about the unhelpful attitude that plagues the Linux community, not only in here but in general.

Reason why the forum staff does this is to improve the discussion. “Fuck this and fuck that” won’t help anyone.

1 Like

This is going to be another of my log in/out posts because quite frankly I haven’t seen a reason to log in in a while. But since it’s being brought up.

I saw the RL thread, and my thought was “and that’s going to get shit on.” and sure enough, I checked back to a locked thread. That’s the problem. I can instantly tell which threads are likely to get shit on, and to be perfectly honest, it’s become crushingly boring and dull. I decided I just wasn’t getting anything out of the forum because clearly, I was the out group. And personally when I recognise I’m not really the target audience for something, it makes it pretty easy to lose interest in participating.

The only real difference between here and r/linux is posts can’t be downvoted. That’s about it. It’s the same feeling to me, because I know I’m going to see a lot of things I just have zero interest in and if I do have something to say, I’ll be in the extreme minority and it’s probably a waste of time and energy to speak up.

But this debate has been had before and before that and before that. The problem users are in this thread already, everyone can probably point them out, and they’ll continue being a problem, because banning them would require a major offence, not 10,000 little cuts over however many years it’s been. I’m not even sure I like the idea of banning people for being just genuinely unlikeable, but everyone knows who I mean and everyone HAS KNOWN who I mean for ages, but again we can’t seem to solve the issues.

But I think bluntly, the issue is what kind of a forum do you want? You can have a linux forum for linux people, and the rest of us just have to fuck off, or you lock the linux section away like politics or even just like every other forum I know of. Have it be a SECTION.

Those are the two choices, and I’m afraid I’m not really bothered what the choice is. But you need to choose. CLEARLY BOTH IS NOT WORKING. Or you could do nothing, because that’s really not unreasonable given how everyone involved in running the place does so as their own hobby, or some sort of obligation that nobody else will, and I understand that people are trying.

But it’s not going to get better, it’s just going to wither slowly until the people who genuinely want to try, stop giving a shit.

2 Likes

Its really hard for me to grasp what about linux creates a community (nobody is really in a mac or windows community) and what is the ingredient that makes that community misbehave as it does.

probably the mistrust of literally anyone or anything resembling authority. Which is what the core tenants are obviously built around, ie doing it your own way.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t provide anybody not already in the community with anything but counter-counter authority issues, ie “they can shit in their pool all they want, it’s not my yard”.

I do personally distrust authority but I don’t think thats the reason I act like an ass.

I don’t have the responsibility of a moderator or find myself on this forum much to know what you’re talking about, but all I can say is that wherever I’ve been here, it’s been great. Whoever I’ve talked to and all of those from the threads I’ve read have been above-par.
They’ll never see this but I’m thankful to them for their help

6 Likes

Well one of the issues there is with a global linux section as we have on our forum.
And with linux communities on the internet in general,
is that Linux enthusiasts who adopt a certain distro believe that it is the best thing ever.
And they generally advocate and voice their opinions about it.
Most of those people aren’t generally objective for linux and foss in general.
But mainly just distro lovers.

This is not an issue with our forum, but this is just what generally happens on the internet.
One thing we could do about this would be dividing the linux section in subsections.
So that Linux elitists have their own sections to nerd all around about the distro,
or platform they think is the best thing ever.

This way we might see less distro is superior to that bla bla flame wars.

I generally compare linux enthusiasts a bit to socker supporters.
They all love socker / football, but think that their actual club are the best in the competition.
They generally aint neutral with some exceptions of course.

1 Like

Interestingly I don’t see distrowars as much of an issue on this forum. It doesn’t seem to come up much. I barely even know what distros people use, and in most cases I don’t know because people don’t talk about it usually.

1 Like

Yeah it is not as bad as it used to be anymore indeed.
Because we are trying to iron it out as much as possible.
But i still see topics where people run into issues with a said distro like mint for example.
And instead of helping people, i still see comments like ¨Mint sucks¨ use Manjaro,
and such kind of things.
And that pretty much happen everywhere on the internet.

That is one of the reason why there is so much negativity,
amongst certain linux communities in general.
This is not just L1 techs, but itś everywhere.

I still think when you divide the linux community in subsections,
in which people are around who actually use a certain base,
that it would be more helpfull for new users in general.
And might lead to less negativity maybe…