In all fairness, the guy was being a dick (no pun intended) to Zed. However, Zed should have kept the insults to the troll and left Github, Powerset, Engine Yard, and the Ruby community out.
The value proposition of the Ruby community has more to do with their mindshare than their technical merit.
Compare and contrast Scientology with Psychiatry. Both communities make similar value propositions: improve mental health.
Scientology is optimized to gain and keep converts and to spread like a viral meme.
Psychiatry is optimized to achieve good treatment outcomes.
Scientology makes more money despite being a less effective form of therapy.
Virality itself is adaptive, so the Ruby community thrives and survives despite being a mediocre technology. Everything about ruby is optimized for gaining converts, attention and cohesion. Hard technical merit is less important in this case than community cohesion, growth, and publicity. Flamewars bring the ruby community publicity and this leads to growth which leads to the survival and replication of ruby.
Erlang and C++ survive on hard technical merits. They take a different evolutionary strategy that requires less propaganda / groupthink.
Just look at the life cycle of communities as if they were a species and it all makes sense.
Scientology makes more money [than the field of psychiatry].
This seems really questionable to me. If we assume 13 psychiatrists per 100K people in 2005 ( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=523453 ), and just count Europe and the US, that's ~80K psychiatrists, and if they average 120K USD per year, that's nearly 10 billion USD. Scientology had a worldwide income of less than 400 million in 1993 ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-Xo-q... ), so it would have had to grow by 20 times to rival psychiatry circa 2005.
I think psychiatry (leaving aside everything but actual practicing psychiatrists) probably dwarfs Scientology in total income.
I don't know about the Erlang trolls, but the C++ trolls are out writing shitty internal corporate apps for Windows, leaving no source and forcing a company to use the buggy app in perpetuity.
I've been trolled by people in lots of different "communities." PHP, Postgres, Java, Perl and Lua just to name a few. IMHO if a software community doesn't have jerks and trolls, it's because nobody is using the software. Ruby has its share but I don't find it any worse than the others.
I guess he felt that others besides the troll were having a laugh at his expense, (i.e., the HN Tips guys comments, other penis-oriented repos connected to employees of aforementioned companies) and were, if only indirectly, in on the joke.
Yep, that's what people seem to gloss over when they think I just overreacted. I knew for a fact that several Ruby people considered this hilarious, and that one or more of them worked at github. In that situation, it's either I leave silently (which everyone thinks I should have done), or bring the issue up and make sure everyone knows what's going on. I prefer the latter because it at least lets others come behind me and avoid the problem.
Thankfully, they've fixed the problem now and I don't have to worry about it anymore.
You and others which may have been trolled before and did not "make a fuss". I see many here with a bully mentality, saying that one should just keep their head down and endure the trolls crap and they will go away. Except they won't.
That's a pretty lucid and well written account. I would like to know more about the connection between HackerNewsTips and Github though. Github employees have denied it here on HN.
We haven't shouted this from the rooftops primarily because we're tired of this being the story when it should have focused on the bullying and our addressing of the problem.
This is a very good feature, but I am also afraid it will make Zed Shaw and others think that his attempt to out-troll the trolls and multiply internet drama was a force for positive change. "If you throw a big enough temper tantrum and incite a large enough shitstorm, developers will address your concerns" is an unfortunate precedent. The fact that controversy and negativity attracts eyeballs and can trigger improvements is understandable, but it also creates perverse incentives.
Sometimes you have to look at what somebody says, and not how they say it. I personally wouldn't have approached the trolls the way Zed did, but he was right that this was broken and needed to be fixed. Github did a great job - as far as I can tell they handled things professionally and cranked out a fix in just a few days. Everybody wins (except the trolls).
I do not agree. You can't simply ignore HOW somebody says something. How you say something almost more important than what you say.
If Zed hadn't written a blog post detailing how he fucked everything up (in all his greatness, apparently) it wouldn't have gotten such exposure and would likely have died out.
He had to make his point with a hammer or it wouldn't have mattered. And it's unfortunate that it took a hammer to make the point. I'd even go so far as to say this feature isn't actually all that important. Zed Shaw just MADE it important.
> If Zed hadn't written a blog post detailing how he fucked everything up (in all his greatness, apparently) it wouldn't have gotten such exposure and would likely have died out.
Can you explain where in my blog post I claim I'm great? I think all I did was explain what was happening and how this was someone who bothered me in the past and followed me to github, and then there was nothing I could do about it.
I guess I figured it was implied. With your influence, you totally could've emailed the github guys and voice your concerns privately. Instead, you chose to do your own thing and publicize it and how awesomely you pwned the dude.
And then you claimed it was all to improve the github experience. Cmon.
So, you basically were stirring up drama by exaggerating what I said for effect, yet I'm the drama queen and attention whore.
Next time, actually read what I write instead of just imagining you read it after seeing a stream of tweets and your buddies on reddit tell it to you 4th person in some comments. For example, I didn't contact github because I knew one of the peole working there was in on the joke. If you read what I wrote you would have known that, idiot.
> For example, I didn't contact github because I knew one of the peole working there was in on the joke.
For the record, this isn't true no matter how many times you repeat it. You should have emailed us and we would have taken care of it without a holiday weekend filled with unnecessary drama.
> For the record, this isn't true no matter how many times you repeat it.
What it looks like from an outsider: He said, (s)he said.
I don't know if Zed is right. I don't know if you are right. What I do know is Zed Shaw ranted and got stuff fixed. Apparently, their was some merit to what he was saying, and at least the majority of his story can confirmed to be true. As for the employee, it's just as easy for you to be misinformed or simply ignorant of the truth as it is for Zed to be wrong. No malice, just mistaken.
Here's another data point: when Zed went off on Debian, he was either really mistaken or simply imagining things that have no connection with reality.
> This is what Debian maintainers are doing, but there's a very specific reason why they do this and it's not a "culture clash". It's embrace and extend which they probably learned from Microsoft. You see, if you have to adapt your software and processes to their weird layout and packages, then you can't get off their platform. It is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture.
> It's simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian.
Whether you like Debian and agree with their technical decisions, or not, it's a non-profit completely based on open-source code. There is no business, and there is no motivation to lock you in to Debian, and there is no desire to do so, either. Complaining about Debian in technical terms is fine; making stuff up about the project is beyond the pale.
After that episode, I became much more inclined to take what Zed has to say with a large grain of salt.
> After that episode, I became much more inclined to take what Zed has to say with a large grain of salt.
Like I said, it's essentially a he said, she said match. github, if anything, let themselves get pulled into it. Just fix the problem and move on. The only they've done is make note of what they disagree with (and frankly, their denials don't match up with what Zed accused anyways).
I learned a long time ago that as a company, you should avoid getting into a pissing contest on the forums.
Hey Zed, I appreciate your hyperbolic writing style and I think the point you made was well thought out and well presented the first time, but this kind of mudslinging just isn't necessary. Just take the high road on this comment.
"For example, I didn't contact github because I knew one of the peole working there was in on the joke."
hmm, couldn't it be that some other customer service people would actually do their job about your issue? How do you know it would all be channeled through this one guy that was in on the joke? In any case if they did ignore your request, you could still do the whole crashing thing...
Come on, admit that Zed is funny with style. He's bragging, too, but it's never condescending. That's the difference between a gentleman and dandy, and an ugly troll.
You know, I grew in the society which had a lot of problems and a consequence grew a very good sense of humor (and that without laugh tracks).
If someone thinks that Zed's writing is funny they still have a lot to discover.
You still have to admit that zed went through a lot of trouble just to stop the harassment. I'd probably make a blog post too if the harassment went on for as long as it did for zed.
I love how you're this paragon of stoic virtue, and I'm a drama queen, yet, here you are talking about it even more instead of ignoring it and going back to whatever it was you were doing.
Thanks for the reply, and your accusation of hypocrisy has some justice to it. I actually have a lot of respect for you and appreciate your projects and most of your writing, but I still don't think you handled this entire situation as well as you could have. I apologize if some of my vocabulary ("tantrum") is itself an example of what I was criticizing.
Theres a difference between discussing the concept of "internet drama" and actually creating "internet drama". Mycroftiv is doing the former whereas you do the latter.
I don't understand this bizarre desire to resort to acrobatics to paint anyone who ever opens their mouth as a hypocrite. Do you really want everyone to just shut up about everything? Then doesn't that make you a hypocrite?
What I mean to say is, OP is talking about internet drama as a whole and how this incident sets a bad example for the community. And I realize that simply because Zed is even mentioned a certain amount of drama is brought in but the intent is clearly different.
The goal of internet drama is to make the instigator and everyone they know laugh at what they've done. The initial 'poke' will generate some of that, but a 'successful' attack will generate days of discussion that 'everyone' laughs at. I get that there are lots of people who don't understand this on this forum, but, asking for citations to understand concepts that are described on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama) is a bit ridiculous, don't you agree?
Just because you can identify the mechanism by which this most-basic feature of social networks was implemented, that doesn't mean that it's a bad thing.
The cart should not be put before the horse by implying that this missing feature was simply used as an excuse to be negative. What's the perverse incentive here, that it's actually in GitHub's interest to prevent users from blocking each other?
"The squeaky wheel gets the grease" and public shame were invented way before the Internet, so this makes no precedent. It's just one of the myriad ways in which things get done. Ever had a boss?
> will make Zed Shaw and others think that his attempt to out-troll the trolls and multiply internet drama was a force for positive change.
To be fair, in this case, that does appear to be exactly what happened. Github had a problem. Someone exposed it and then Zed used his considerable influence to "force" github to fix it.
You could chalk it up to stress testing that pointed out a flaw. And to GitHub's credit they provided a quick fix and a professional response, kudos to them. Peace has been restored in the Valley, and the trolls are left to twiddle their ASCII dongs.
In my opinion, they should thank Zed. Github missed a really important issue and he proved it. First thing in social and content driven system is to spam-proof it. Especially that Github is all about productivity.
>"If you throw a big enough temper tantrum and incite a large enough shitstorm, developers will address your concerns" is an unfortunate precedent.
Its unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that they either were, or were perceived as (which is just as bad for the customer), so out of touch with the user base that such action was necessary.
>it also creates perverse incentives
No, it was created by a general disregard for customer service. The attitude that an issue is fine to ignore unless it is boiling over is what created the incentive, that was ages ago.
I don't know much about github's customer service,= but from what I can extrapolate from Shaw's rant, their service had a flaw which was likely just an oversight. Shaw never made an attempt to contact github about it (under the belief that they were in on it) and instead chose to exploit another flaw in their service and then angrily blog about it.
I don't see how that makes github "out of touch" nor do I see how this situation was created by a "general disregard of customer service." Granted this might be true, but it doesn't sound like it had anything to do with this particular incident.
I think zed had a reasonable complaint. was he a jerk about it? maybe, but it's a customer's prerogative to complain about a bad experience. github's prompt response to zed has made me a happier (paying) customer. way to go!
YEP! Props to Zed. After calling a bunch of people homophobes and writing some code to engage in an asshole war within the confines of GitHub, he got a simple feature implemented that would have probably been fast tracked with a reasonable email.
Is this due to the recent drama with Zed Shaw being invited to the "DongML" project? Very entertaining as an observer, but very annoying for Zed I'm sure.
Sad that they still haven't added a requirement that you accept an invite to become a collaborator, or at least a profile setting on your account that requires that confirmation.
It's interesting to me that so many people want confirmations. You can remove yourself from any repository you wish at https://github.com/account/repositories (yes, I know — this is a confusing place. It's something I'd like to improve). But the idea is that "Confirm? Reject." is the same number of steps/interactions as "Added. Reject." Confirmations wouldn't make the experience any better for someone being annoyingly added to projects. They'd just be rejecting invitations instead of rejecting access.
As it stands, when you are added as a collaborator to a project it shows up in exactly one place — your private, logged in dashboard. It doesn't show up publicly anywhere.
Bypassing confirmations keeps the workflow simple for the professionals who use GitHub and want to collaborate with ease.
I would disagree. If I happened to be in the job market, and my potential employer were to look at my github profile (yes, we do look at your github profile) and find "bigdicksucker" as one of the repos I'm apparently a "contributor" on, well, that wouldn't look too good, would it?
As it stands, when you are added as a collaborator to a project it shows up in exactly one place — your private, logged in dashboard. It doesn't show up publicly anywhere.
You must make a contribution to a project before you show up in any kind of public fashion.
Wouldn't it be possible for the troll to temporarily set his username to the same as yours in his git config, make a few commits, and then push them, thereby making it look like you had made a contribution to the project? Would this make your "membership" in the project appear publicly?
Or does Github track pushes by the pusher's Github username?
I think it tracks everything with the public key that you use to push to github. The username will look the same, but will not be linked to your account.
I think the number of steps isn't really that important. For me I care more about permission being explicit and not implicit. I prefer systems where other users have to get my permission to interact with me rather than automatically having permission to do so. It matters more on systems other than github but I think there's still an avenue for abuse with the current set up.
It should be fairly trivial to script account creation, project creation, and marking someone as a collaborator. As such a troll could simply automate the process of creating accounts and junk projects and then add the victim as a collaborator to them. The result is a useless dashboard full of crap that the victim has to manually remove themselves from. The troll succeeds in screwing with the victim by wasting lots of time. If permission had to be explicitly granted there would be no change to the dashboard and all of the confirmation messages could be ignored, or ideally bulk deleted from the incoming message queue. I don't have any idea if there's flood prevention mechanisms built into github to prevent this, but with unlimited public projects on the free accounts it seems like an avenue of abuse for trolls.
You'd just have a dashboard full of invites instead of a dashboard full of add notices. I have a feeling people just recoil to confirmation systems because it's comfortable.
> You'd just have a dashboard full of invites instead of a dashboard full of add notices.
I don't participate on github so I did't think you'd just stuff all of those notices on the dashboard. That sounds like a pretty broken UI IMHO.
> But remember that Undo > Confirmation. Always.
That's your opinion and it's very clear from this thread that a significant number of people strongly disagree with it. I will concede that Undo in this context has much less friction, likely for most github users. I wouldn't necessarily agree that it's better and certainly not always.
It depends on the context. In the last two years I've worked on apps where undo would mean incurring liability or potentially losing money immediately following a change. In the first example where liability would be incurred allowing the user to undo a change would actually mean that two changes were made and both have to be tracked, with full audit trail etc. By prompting users for confirmation you have an opportunity to ensure that the user understands the consequences of their decisions. That may not matter for adding a contributor to a github project but it does when changing a federal form or legal document for example.
So in this case, you're not talking about making the software easier to use, you're talking about about making a cleaner legal audit trail. Which I'll still argue makes the application in question harder to use and is a worse software choice.
But a worse interface that makes the software easier to code is one thing; a worse interface that makes the software more easily comply with the law is an entirely different trade-off.
> you're talking about about making a cleaner legal audit trail.
Not exactly, the legal audit trail can be messy and it doesn't matter one bit so long as it's accurate. In the case described change one is logged and the undo constitues a second change which is also logged. Change one incurs liability for the user and change two simply increases the liability for the user (sorry I can't go into specifics) even though it's correcting a problem. In my experience it's very difficult to create a user interface where the "undo" action clearly indicates the consequence of the change in these scenarios. Preventing unnecessary changes via a combination of up front documentation and confirmation provided the better user experience, and legal liability reduction, in my experience and based on some user feedback.
> But a worse interface that makes the software easier to code is one thing; a worse interface that makes the software more easily comply with the law is an entirely different trade-off.
Believe me, not confirming user actions would have been less code and easier to build and maintain in this case. Legal compliance on my part would have been maintained in either case. Allowing my users to quickly and easily build up liability would be doing them a disservice however. Adding some friction to those transactions was agreed to be the better option by everyone involved.
I think the idea that confirmation vs undo is subjective. We can go on and on for hours and come up with examples and counter examples. The particular context of the action likely determines which provides the better user experience in total (not just on that one screen or interaction but via the consequences of the action as well). I would certainly prefer that if I'm using a system like facebook that it confirm I really want to make my home address and phone number public before it does so rather than letting me check a box and it's done. The same goes with a money transfer where an undo may not even be possible after some amount of time. Not prompting for confirmation certainly makes the transactions move faster (less friction) and undo is easy enough in many cases, but does that frictionless transaction have the best outcome for my users? Not always. The blanket statement that "undo > confirmation. Always." is just plain wrong, not that you made it of course.
Given the choice between a private dashboard vs a public repo list being spammed, I'll take the former, any day. I don't want either, but the former is an annoyance to me and only me. The latter is something that can (potentially) give a bad impression of me to others.
I'm not sure how many times I have to say it: Adding someone as a collaborator is not publicly visible until you collaborate (make commits) on the project. At that point we show the activity on your public profile.
This is, however, kind of counterintuitive for most people. Principle-of-least-surprise suggests you could do something about this; split the dashboard, say, into projects you participate in (indicated by having committed) and projects you've been invited to. You don't need the separate approval step there, so the workflow's the same, but it'd feel much more obvious.
Also; with the "professionals" thing - I totally get what you mean, and it's abundantly clear you guys are doing things for the right reasons, but the tone kind of jarred with me a little bit there. Nothing drastic, but I'm a person first, a professional second...
Up until just now, I didn't know that. And if you didn't reply to my comment just now, I still wouldn't know it.
And you explicitly telling people about how being a collaborator works isn't a scalable way for people to find out. And it sounds like this question/issue has come up before. Perhaps it can be made clearer somehow?
In any case, thanks for clarifying when you become visible as a collaborator, even if only in this one comment to me.
For me, it was pretty obvious because it doesn't show up on the profile under 'Public Repositories', only on the dashboard in a list of projects you have access to.
The thing is that this is amazingly rare. The handful of times it's happened, the 'victim' most likely just removes the repo (which has always been possible) and that's the end of it. Others might say to their friends on IRC "Hey, can you see dongml in my projects list on github?" and sure enough the answer will be 'no'.
It's easy to say "oh just add it to the UI", but to actually do it is another story. Before you know it you've got hundreds of preferences, and then people will be complaining that there's too many options and it's too confusing (a-la facebook privacy settings). Honestly, GitHub's preference pages already need some work, so I for one am glad they don't add drop downs for every person's pet feature.
Regardless, it doesn't matter now. Now you just remove the project and block the user (or, presumably, just blocking the user might remove the repo... either way), so that's that.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I mean making it more clear in the UI that there's a separation between projects where you're a committer, and where you're just invited (to use another poster's words). If an (apparently) Github employee feels the need to wonder how often he's going to have to explain it, it seems that there exists a common confusion in the distinction.
Yea sorry I tangent-ed a bit there. Probably because I just think this is a non-issue. It's in the UI in that it's listed in your repositories you have access to, but not on your profile. I don't see what kind of UI change they could make that would make it clearer short of text or a tooltip or something, and I think that the %0.001 of users who would ever care is just not worth the time to even considering it. The reason kneath was wondering how many times he had to say it is because it's all over this thread -- including the direct parent of the asker in this case.
Except that when you are added, you start getting e-mail for commits, the subject line of which for dongml was an ASCII art penis. I'm a mongrel2 contributor and I received a half a dozen ascii art penises in my inbox towards the end of last week. Those were easy enough to filter out, since the subject line contains the project, but then the same guy also initiated a couple pull requests against mongrel2 with ascii art penises. This was clearly abusive behavior, and I'm glad that there are now tools to help prevent it.
I agree that I don't want to see confirmations in my GitHub, but you are incorrect about them being equivalent. The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing. In most well-designed systems, as long as there's an outstanding request, they can't bug you any more.
You can't have "do nothing" mean both "do not accept (yet?)" and also "accept!"; if no action keeps you from accepting, it means it'll take an extra step to actually accept an invitation. If the common case is not trolling, that adds friction.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Obviously "do nothing" can't mean both. Obviously the entire point of a confirmation would be such that it would take an action to be "accept", so that means that "do nothing" would have to be "do not accept (yet?)". Obviously this is only useful for GH if trolling is the common case. And obviously I started my post by saying I did not want confirmations. So what exactly are you trying to argue against?
Upon rereading I'm not sure what I meant either. My guess is that I was responding to
> The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing.
and didn't read carefully. I was probably pointing out that if trolling is not the common case then that system is not in fact optimal (which I think we agree on), without realizing you didn't claim it was the optimal system but only the optimal system-which-uses-confirmations. Sorry about that.
I tend to agree with this line of thinking. I was added to half a dozen projects today alone. It would have been a pain to have to confirm each one.
Your average professional developer isn't trolled on a regular basis, nor would they go about adding "tech stars" to their repos just to have a big name on there or because they wished that person was a contributor - it's unprofessional and rude. So just dismissing yourself from the projects you are maliciously or mistakenly added to seems much simpler than having to confirm each one.
Sad that they still haven't added a requirement that you accept an invite to become a collaborator
That's one way to look at it..the other way is that they just designed coded, tested and rolled out a feature a day or two after a fairly hostile and accusatory customer complaint.
It was. But he is technically a "customer". More eyeballs == more potential conversions. Zed happens to give that, fortunately or unfortunately. But they were able to please a potential customer, and just give a better product overall. So maybe its because of something bad, but it's great product iteration.
The implemented solution is impressively elegant. Keep the barrier very low to join another project and provide a mean to block undesirable subsciptions. There is still a possibility for harrasement with multiple projects, but there is a report to staff option now to solve it.
These are very smart, efficient and pragmatic solutions. It's also a demonstration of what is meant by "good execution".
It's a logical feature for a site with a social aspect to offer, and I'm surprised github hadn't done so previously. I suppose the audience for the site tends to be mature.
Good for Github for going ahead and doing it. I know of some companies who would have dug their heels in and ignored the issue, or stubbornly maintained that it wasn't needed.
I'm glad Zed made this an issue. No one should be harassed like that. Honestly, it made github look very unprofessional. I'm glad they stepped-in and fixed it.
The profile page needs tidy up - if only it split the projects into tbose you collaborate on,and those you are invited to collaborate on. Its just wording, but it makes it clear that being added to a repo you haven't contributed to will not be shown publicly.
There is somethig to that idea: you are only invited to participate in a project until you accept the invitation by actually commiting to the project. Eveyone is happy: Nobody needs to change the code (except for resorting the display of the projects on the private dashboard into two groups) and participation requires an explicit confirmation. Win-win :-).
Zed just seems to react strongly to anyone who tries to intimidate him. Same deal with all the people called out in the classic Rails post. I don't fault him for it.
I'm surprised that this feature wasn't in there to begin with. All social networking (which is primarily what Github is about - the source control really isn't anything new) should include bilateral confirmation.
What they've implemented is adequate, but I'd rather see something much stronger, like active confirmation from both parties before being added to a project.
You know what, you're a dickhead. Guys like you are all tough when they're on forums like this, but you wouldn't ever say anything like this to my face. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've been to a couple meetups in the city and you've not said a damn thing to me.
Next time you want to call me a "whore", why don't you email me and meet me in person like a man instead of pretending like you are one online.
Chill out? You just called me a whore douchebag. Now you want to buy me a beer?
You see, this is what pisses me off about you whiners claiming I'm stirring up drama. I didn't say a damn thing to you until you started insulting me in these comments. I didn't say a damn thing to you. The only contact I've had with you is one tweet. Yet, here you are insulting me as if you know me personally and I've treated you poorly.
Then what do you think I should do? Oh that's right, not be a drama queen and just shut up and let you call me goddamn whore. 'Cause if I stand up to you, I'm causing drama, but you coming here and insulting me is totally alright and just a nice Tuesday evening.
Firstly, I called you a name that I now regret. It was a juvenile move and it was said in a moment of anger. I really do apologize. Should I delete the comment?
Secondly, I'm not criticizing you for standing up for yourself. Don't try to frame this as if you're a poor victim of the internet. This is a discussion forum. I'm not an anonymous troll, my identity is in my profile.
You dramatized things in the first place, not by standing up for yourself. The beer offer still stands.
what made you so angry that you reverted to behaving childishly?
that seems like an oddly strong reaction to this thread?
Given that you responded in such a dramatic fashion to something that genuinely didn't involve you in any way whatsoever, why are you criticizing Zed for reacting strongly to a far greater provocation?
I think it's just built up over time. I've never met Zed. I don't quite understand how he's built such a following -- it's quite possible it's because he's a nice guy who helps people. It strikes me from what I've read by him and about him that this SEEMS unlikely, but again, I do not know him.
The opinion that drove my response was that this was a monstrous waste of resources for github. Zed has influence and his blog post provoked a reaction that was unnecessary. We don't know how widespread this problem is on github. This is the first time I, or anybody I've spoken with, has even heard of anyone having this problem. Running a startup (I imagine), especially one with as much success as github, is almost certainly incredibly difficult. Reading a blog post rant by someone with influence has got to be a real bitch. And they handled it with grace and patience. Which is more than I can say about myself and Zed.
I'm not saying they were bullied, but Zed forced them to respond. He did it in a juvenile way, and it truly wasn't unreasonable for him to handle it in a more mature way. Email them. He's criticized me for not emailing him and meeting him face to face, so why didn't he waltz on over to GitHub HQ in town here and talk to them?
Oh, because then he wouldn't get any publicity. Doing support and keeping a startup in a good position despite outspoken users (who don't pay for the service) is a completely thankless job. I give github a ton of credit for responding well over a holiday weekend to what amounts to a screaming child. Not many other companies would do that.
I've only met Zed once, it was at EuroDjangoCon in Prague a few years ago. Zed did a keynote speech, and afterwards in the lobby as he sat down near me, I told him how much I enjoyed it, just expecting the usual "thanks, glad you did" or whatever. What actually followed was a nearly two hour conversation, over lunch, on topics from music to education to my dumb startup idea. Zed talked with passion and intelligence on all three, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing - and I'm just some dumb schmuck programmer he's never met before.
I see a lot of what is said about Zed online, and I think it's sad, because in real life, he's a fucking stand-up guy.
I don't actively loathe him, but the persona he spends so much time cultivating is brash and irritating. It seems whenever I see his name mentioned, it's because he's making a stink about something, rather than doing something useful. I get that he does useful things, and LPtHW is apparently a great resource, but he (intentionally) attracts far more attention with his antics than his works.
The court jester may make a good point every now and then, but he's still a clown.
He must realize his "loud" persona is what brings out the trolls that he so often complains about, so I'm going to guess that yes, it's calculated. Turn off the persona, ignore the trolls, and the trolls will go away.
I don't loathe him at all. I just think he could spend his time better, especially when he has such a captivated audience. Instead of setting an example of being a troll and responding immaturely (and threatening to leave github, oh my). He's fairly arrogant and preaches his opinions on how to run startups, of which he's never done.
He seems to inflame conversations for the sake of inflaming them. That's all. He likes the attention.
He has a tendency to blow things out of proportion and to air these problems publicly, using inflammatory language when most people would choose to use more direct channels.
All of the incidents I have read about have been legitimate problems, but I personally would have handled all of them very differently.
This particularly incident, for example, probably could have been solved simply by e-mailing github. In Shaw's case, he assumed they were in on it. I'm sure he had his reasons, and certainly the troll behind dongml gets no sympathy from me but I don't think blaming github and dragging them into this was appropriate.
Honestly I've never understood why some people (seemingly) defend him unconditionally. It sounds like he's a really stand-up guy in real life, but I'm still willing to call out my friends when I think they've gone too far.
May be before putting all your blames on a open source community, you should have studied a little bit of social-anthropology.
You see, if you had involved deeply with any hot new tech community, like node.js, instead of Rails, you would have had the same problem with that community.
I wish I could block zedshaw from all of the internet. I wrote a web proxy once which cuts out adverts - I think I could extend it to block zedshaw too. But my proxy is old, and had bugs with some webservers.
Maybe a zedblock plugin for firefox would be cool instead?
Even better would be to just integrate it into firefox. But then you'd still have to put up with the character whilst using other browsers.
Which means a WC3 draft would be more appropriate, so that all of the browsers could implement it. I imagine WHATWG have already got something in the works though. They've been doing a lot of good work with the whole html5 thing.
Does it bother anyone else that github appears to be following a Concerned father approach here? I guess it's not that bad. Other internet forums have moderators and such, but github isn't really about the project - but the individual. So I'm not sure how letting other people moderate for you would work within the github garden.
In all fairness, the guy was being a dick (no pun intended) to Zed. However, Zed should have kept the insults to the troll and left Github, Powerset, Engine Yard, and the Ruby community out.