Identifying Toxic Content Can Be a First Step To Addressing It:
Trolls, haters, flamers and other ugly characters are, unfortunately, a fact of life across much of the internet. Their ugliness ruins social media networks and sites like Reddit and Wikipedia.
But toxic content looks different depending on the venue, and identifying online toxicity is a first step to getting rid of it.
[...] To better understand what toxicity looked like in the open-source community, the team first gathered toxic content. They used a toxicity and politeness detector developed for another platform to scan nearly 28 million posts on GitHub made between March and May 2020. The team also searched these posts for "code of conduct" — a phrase often invoked when reacting to toxic content — and looked for locked or deleted issues, which can also be a sign of toxicity.
[...] "Toxicity is different in open-source communities," Miller said. "It is more contextual, entitled, subtle and passive-aggressive."
Only about half the toxic posts the team identified contained obscenities. Others were from demanding users of the software. Some came from users who post a lot of issues on GitHub but contribute little else. Comments that started about a software's code turned personal. None of the posts helped make the open-source software or the community better.
"Worst. App. Ever. Please make it not the worst app ever. Thanks," wrote one user in a post included in the dataset.
[...] "We've been hearing from developers and community members for a really long time about the unfortunate and almost ingrained toxicity in open-source," Miller said. "Open-source communities are a little rough around the edges. They often have horrible diversity and retention, and it's important that we start to address and deal with the toxicity there to make it a more inclusive and better place."
Paper pre-print and video of the talk.
Journal Reference:
Courtney Miller, Sophie Cohen, Daniel Klug, et al., "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions, 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022), Pittsburgh, PA, 2022.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:04AM
The article has an interesting observation:
Instead of code of conducts maybe all that is needed is giving preference to non-toxic (aka: polite and constructive) criticism to improve things.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:17AM (16 children)
I have no use for pleasantries. You can tell me I'm an asshole, a moron or whatever other colorful adjective or noun you have for me, as long as you can explain the reason behind this. Otherwise, you can save yourself the keyboard wear and the internet the transfer of the bytes because I don't give a fuck about opinions.
We're techs here. Not management, not marketing. We don't care how you dress, we don't care what flowery language you use. We care whether you know your shit or whether you don't.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Bethany.Saint on Sunday July 03 2022, @01:26PM (8 children)
You using an aggressive tone in your reply to make a point? Can't you can use a neutral or even welcoming tone just as easily? It's just a matter of word choice. What does it say if you find it natural to respond to others with hostility when it's equally easy not to?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @01:58PM (7 children)
Of course I could tell people nicely that they're dolts. Dunno what purpose this would serve, it doesn't make them any less of a dolt.
I usually don't go out of my way to insult people. But I also don't really see the need to sugarcoat it. Language is a medium of communication. I prefer to use it for that instead of tapdancing around the issue. All that usually serves is that the recipient doesn't get the message.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bethany.Saint on Sunday July 03 2022, @02:21PM (2 children)
You don't need to sugarcoat your responses. Just as you don't need to use aggressive insulting language. You can convey the exact same message in the exact same time without the hostile tone. It's a zero effort choice which tone you use ... unless it's intrinsic at this point.
>>All that usually serves is that the recipient doesn't get the message.
Or that your message is wrong even though you truly believe it's correct.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday July 03 2022, @03:34PM (1 child)
I would disagree. There are messages that clearly are best served with a dose of anger and an f-bomb or two. Sometimes by sugarcoating it you don't relay the entire message -- be it that they they are idiots, they should stfu and stop bothering you. By telling them that straight and in as few words (or as many as needed) possible you convey that feeling of anger or annoyance in a manner that they have apparently previously missed. Also perhaps worth noting is that sometimes in text various social ques are clearly lost, or lost to some people. So it's not so much that one should go out of once way to fill every response with as much profanity as possible but clearly sometimes it's just the best and most succinct way to do it instead of dancing around the issue. Not to mention that cursing and swearing have proven to a stress relief in some people and making them feel better; how the recipient feels is secondary in that regard.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:07PM
Insulting replies to a post will more likely than not trigger a defensive response in the poster, making them less likely to openly consider your points. That's particularly true if the post simply reads "You're an idiot and you're wrong".
A well-reasoned, neutral response is far more likely to be read and considered by the OP. An insult will be ignored or defended against without necessarily taking on board any feedback (other than how to refute it).
Going back to Opportunist's original question of what's the point of being polite? It depends, is your objective to inform and change the opinion of others, or is it just to tell everyone that you're right?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @02:39PM (1 child)
That exactly.
Much of the world today spends their time worrying about feelz. If someone needs their feelz stroked, they should visit their psychologist, or make the effort to find that special other who genuinely cares about their feelz. Don't go to a developer's site or forum, expecting that developer to stroke your feelz.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @02:16PM
I don't care about some feelz. Yes, I'll laude a good design or post a "works, awesome" or something like that, but if you want a medal for your work, join the military.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by http on Monday July 04 2022, @12:39AM (1 child)
Sure there's no need to sugarcoat it. But there's also no need to be a jerk about it. If you're regularly a jerk about it, it sends a clear message to the actual human beings on the other end of the ones and zeros. I mean, you do know there's actual people on the other end, don't you?
Anyways, that message is, you're a shit human being who practices being offensive. It may or may not be true, but it's the message those people get.
If you're not aware that that's the message you're sending out, maybe you're not as good at communicating as you think you are - and so should really not be in tech (if you must be, please stay away from documentation and any public-facing role). If you are aware, then you're as shit as you seem and shouldn't be in anything.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @01:48PM
I am not the most social person you'll find in the world. True. But I'm not here to socialize, I'm here to get shit done. I need documentation to explain the schematics. I don't need it to feel good. If I want to feel good, I get some fuzzy bathrobes and go to my sauna. I don't work there, though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 03 2022, @02:25PM (6 children)
Question: have you ever tried to do anything with ffmpeg at the source codes community level?
I was in and out of modifying and compiling ffmpeg sources around ten to twelve years ago. The phrase: "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and xenophobia" comes immediately to mind when remembering attempts to glean useful information from the community message boards, let alone interacting with them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @04:10PM (3 children)
Not exactly my field of expertise, no. I usually spend my time around the embedded community, and people are generally quite civil until some code you check in fries their expensive hardware. Then they are a bit miffed and you won't hear the end of it.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday July 04 2022, @06:45AM (1 child)
The lesson here is that you should always test your code thoroughly before pushing upstream. And the people upstream should also review and test it thoroughly. People make mistakes, no matter how large their egos.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @08:49AM
With embedded, you're dealing with a bunch of configurations you can't always anticipate. Twice so when you're in the middle of development and testing. You have a bunch of shit on your breadboard, still attached to a controller because you tried something, someone uploads a new bit for some part of the design, you try it and because of something that happens to be attached, that the original contributor didn't have in his setup, the magic smoke of an expensive chip escapes.
That happens. Yes, it shouldn't, but it does. Some things have unexpected side effects. You draw a little bit too much current here or pump too much there, you thought that 1kO resistor is a 1mO, you draw that Zener the wrong way around and whoever builds it didn't look and installs it that way... that shit happens. I has happened to me, and if it hasn't happened to you (and you're doing embedded design), all that means is that it eventually will.
Nobody starts calling people names because of that. At worst you get a "Damn, (name), you're an EE? If you send that to your school you might get a refund on your degree!" and a takedown request.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 05 2022, @02:35AM
>Not exactly my field of expertise, no.
I worked for a while in Houston. Friends from another company came to lunch one day with new badges signifying the transition of their company to new management (for the third time in the last 20 years) - the badges all had the insignia "HO" which one might assume was new-company speak for Houston, but... word in the rank and file was that it meant: "HO, I'm here for the money."
My foray into video tech was a brief jaunt in the service of the people signing the paychecks, I did it for two companies in the 2010 to 2013 timeframe and have never looked back. It's a sketchy, dank field of endeavor, and I'm glad to be away from it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Monday July 04 2022, @04:16AM (1 child)
Yeah, a subset of open-source projects are like that. For example there's a reasonably widely-used one where a friend of mine reported a straightforward, easy-fix bug and was subject to a withering series of attacks by the maintainers who accused him of deliberately sabotaging their precious code in order to make them look bad. He was polite the entire time (I wouldn't have been able to do that) while the discussion, if you can call it that, turned into a series of paranoid rants and accusations. Eventually he bailed and AFAIK the bug is still there because it wasn't their code that was buggy, it was reality that was at fault.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 04 2022, @09:53PM
This is why libav forked from ffmpeg, then the two camps proceeded to furiously copy each other's new features such that both were roughly equivalent / compatible alternatives. I quit paying attention in 2013 and haven't been tempted to look back since.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:19AM (6 children)
Is it tho? Naturally there will be differences between various communities. That a open-source-software-development community will have different vocubulary compared to one that discusses cat videos or celebrities or politics or whatever might not be that hard to comprehend. So they will always be contextual in that regard. That it might be more passive-aggressive and subtle might just have more to do with the people and their level of education.
Isn't that the nature of the beast when you ask people to be volunteer (and free) bug hunters for your software? Can they really be expected to conform to your standards? If they post a lot of issues on github perhaps your software is faulty? Or are they pointing out clear issues? Or are they really user-errors? If it's not the last one then you sort of invited the problems yourself by having this sort of open venue. Considering they say that none of the post made the software better I guess they where just user-errors.
Comic.Book.Guy. I can't even tell if that is supposed to be toxic or a bad joke that sort of fell flat.
Why? If they are toxic trolls just ignore them or call them out. Clearly some people just sometimes apparently need to be told to go fuck themselves or that they are wrong and should just uninstall the app and leave. Clearly the app is to advanced for them.
Perhaps in some regard the developers, and their community, become prisoners to their own CoC. They now have to fake being nice and understanding instead of telling idiots to just go away. Clearly some things was better pre-COC. Bring back old Linus.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:43AM (3 children)
Is there a backup, or do we have to trawl old ftp sites instead?
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:59AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday July 03 2022, @01:08PM
The old mailing list is still online and searchable. Where you can read those epic posts when he tell people off or how he sits in bathrobe and codes and doesn't want to do anything that goes against his natural urges :)
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @03:27PM
Just fork an old version, jeesh, people, you do know how github works, don't you?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @01:39PM
Is the CoC really a big deal in any sense, except maybe for the largest projects? It seems to me that if a project with a small development team bothers to write a CoC, they are just codifying how they already act. I'm sure large projects have implemented them for a variety of reasons, including PR, but also to explicitly state "don't be a dick" and have a reason to eject people who cause problems. I've never contributed to the developer community, but is dealing with a project with a CoC a large enough of an annoyance to prevent people from participating?
(Score: 1, Troll) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @03:29PM
Look. When I join an open source project, I do so, usually, because I'm interested in the project, because I like to contribute to it, because I care about the problem it is trying to solve. What I don't care about, at least too much, is the people who contribute to it. The only code I frankly care about is the code that the project is made of.
If your project needs a CoC, it very obviously does not need me. I don't have time for feelings and similar bullshit when I'm trying to get shit done.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:58AM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Sunday July 03 2022, @01:00PM (2 children)
Non-paying customers at that. You get what you pay for.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @04:47PM (1 child)
Why should they pay? The product is shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday July 03 2022, @05:04PM
They seem willing enough to pay for Windows...
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:31PM (4 children)
the ghosts of free speech who remind those tyrannical sites of what they should be are not the problem
the petit tyrants are the problem, and will always be the problem
those who are screaming to get the boot off their necks are not, and never are the problem
sic semper tyrannis
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Mykl on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:12PM
Except here at SN, that person is exactly the problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @08:53AM
Reddit is at this point only good for playing the Reddit game: Find a user you don't like and see how long it takes 'til you can get him banned. It's easier than you may think.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by engblom on Monday July 04 2022, @09:36AM (1 child)
Reddit (and even Soylent news too) got a big problem: down-voting. Take for example knitting. In Europe most knitters keep the yarn in their left hands while most in the US keeps the yarn in the right hand. The result is identical and nobody can later tell if the yarn was held in right or left hand. On Reddit many down-voted very informative posts just because someone kept the yarn in what they considered the "wrong" hand and often even added rude comments. The same happened on bicycle subs and everywhere I went on Reddit. People can simply not accept that some do things in a different way. By giving them power to down-vote you foster a toxic community where people will misuse it.
I think the correct way to do moderation is to only allow up-voting and then for removing stuff a report button. If someone reports stuff that are actually good then the reporter will get banned, otherwise the one that made the bad post should be banned. By doing it like this then the most informative posts get high points and crappy posts that are just bullying or lies gets removed.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 05 2022, @07:54PM
It all comes back to the Sneetches [youtu.be], or just plain human nature [xkcd.com].
Also I didn't know bicyclists held onto yarn while bicycling. That's wild.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Zoot on Monday July 04 2022, @02:45AM (2 children)
Something I learned several decades ago is that customers politeness is proportional to how much they paid for the software. A friend who sold an editor that cost $10,000 on a mini computer and $35 for a PC, described the difference in the customers. The $35 customers would find a typo in the manual and call up and spend 30 minutes screaming at the receptionist on the phone, demanding the issue be addressed AT ONCE! The $10,000 customers would have their company mainframe crashed by the software once a day and they would call up all apologetic saying they were sorry to trouble you, but they think there might possibly be a problem related to your software.
I can only imagine what it's like to do support work for free software.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Monday July 04 2022, @04:21AM (1 child)
That also filters for customer types though. Someone running a $10K package on a minicomputer will be a professional business user where some degree of decorum is expected, and also one where there's an ongoing business relationship that you don't want to sour. Someone running a $35 shareware package on their PC will be using it to publish a newsletter revealing the truth about the UFOs and may not be the most stable individual to deal with.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @08:51AM
Not to mention that now you're part of THEM trying to keep The Truth (tm) from getting out!
(Score: 2) by jb on Monday July 04 2022, @03:35AM (1 child)
There is a huge difference between "the open source community" (as a whole) and just those projects which choose to entrust their source trees to GitHub -- at least, since its acquisition by the Evil Empire(tm), if not before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @06:52AM
This!
Whatever happened to "free as in freedom" software?
"Free as in beer" seems to be causing a lot of beer brawls...?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Monday July 04 2022, @11:07AM
If you're open to more or less anonymous folks you'll attract those who have nothing to offer beyond poisoning the well with their passive-aggressive disorder.
For small projects, unless you're really a divinely blessed cat herder (like Boudewijn Rempt from Krita), a closed mailing list and a brutal dictator will do. Seems to work even at larger scale, I haven't heard about any persisting project managment issues from OpenBSD.
However, I think that large FLOSS projects could organize themselves like outlaw motorcycle clubs. Everyone can call themselves "supporter", and before they become a "hangaround", people of the club have a good look at how supportive they really were. It's the task of the next higher tier to keep the lower ones at bay and if any lower tier causes the slightest bit of issue, they get demoted or booted out. The "hangarounds" would do tasks like testing, "prospects" could line up patches and review them, while only "(full) members" have source tree write rights.
The objection that such a system alienates possibly useful contributors will be raised, but it is bullshit, because anyone worth their weight in software needs to be cynical at a scope wide enough to understand why it is how it is.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Username on Tuesday July 05 2022, @09:31AM
Anything dealing with bug reports or feature requests usually has an army of nine year olds replying with what amounts to "learn to code." Especially true for anything android. I can pretty much guarantee all of these people do not contribute anything significant to the project either. I used to just remind myself that these are nine year olds, and ignore them, but some are really insistent and need feedback as to why I'm not doing what they want. Which usually ends with me educating them and their subsequent temper tantrum.
It's hard to communicate on a projects board without dealing with the... fans... of the project.