The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 4:45 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

> But what is to be done when the person, who is ignoring feedback, is the real problem? [...]
> Instead, in the worst cases, the only real alternative may be to simply ignore the patches.

Of course, life is too short. Why is it so hard to do this consciously considering it's already common place anyway for sheer lack of time?

I can only think of: 1. too much passion; 2. "someone is wrong on the internet" https://xkcd.com/386/

Note 2. happens only when "someone"' message is not *too* obviously wrong - otherwise there wouldn't have been any feedback at all in the first place.

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The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 13:03 UTC (Wed) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link] (2 responses)

According to most schools of sociology, humans are socially responsive, which means that they will be urged to provide social feedback from social stimuli (more or less) no matter the effects.

This instinct, which is not entirely rational, will override the rational choice to just ignore a stimuli in many cases.

So if someone pose you a question, even if there is a good reason to ignore that question altogether, you will be inclined to answer the question, take part in the social interaction, because humans are socially responsive and very much driven by this impulse.

This school of sociology will be in conflict with rational choice theories.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 16:17 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> This school of sociology will be in conflict with rational choice theories.

It's not a conflict because the rational choice theories are about what people actually choose to do, not what their instincts are urging them to do. I can't recall any occasion where it was claimed that instincts or urges are expected to be rational; rather the opposite. Moreover, even if people do act on those urges, what evidence is there to say that they do *not* expect this course of action to best satisfy their own preferences in that moment?

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 24, 2018 19:35 UTC (Wed) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link]

I don't think this is a proper place to debate details about certain social-psychological ideas, people have too many opinions about this and I take it you agree with the first three paragraphs so, we are mostly agreeing anyway.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 6:20 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (2 responses)

I think the option of simply blocking / ignoring someone is much underappreciated these days. People would rather use a code of conduct to get rid of the person altogether instead of just ignoring them personally, which breeds a lot more conflict than is necessary.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 8:40 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is that ignoring only works if everybody ignores that person. It takes only one to feed a troll...

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 14:05 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Just like spam, a fed troll is just an [email] filtering problem: https://lwn.net/Articles/768640/

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 12:54 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course, life is too short. Why is it so hard to do this consciously considering it's already common place anyway for sheer lack of time?

My guess is that Peter feels obligated, by his position as maintainer, to continue to review all submitted patches -- including those from people who continually ignore his feedback; and thus the only available option he sees for responding to that situation is to escalate to attacking the person. Being given a better pattern of response ("This is the third time you've sent patches with this code pattern. From now on, I will review no more than one series from you per month, and I will stop immediately when I see an issue I have commented on previously") which is neither personal nor undue effort for the maintainer goes a long way towards reducing maintainer frustration.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 17:56 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] (1 responses)

My guess is that Peter feels obligated, by his position as maintainer, to continue to review all submitted patches -- including those from people who continually ignore his feedback

Eh, I think your obligation is to the project, not to random difficult contributors.

I don't know, it's hard to discuss in the abstract. The intersection of "capable of providing some value to the project" and "completely ignores clear feedback" sounds rather small, and I'm not thinking of any examples.

The more frequent case is that it's one of those technical disputes where people are just talking past each other. And in that case it's easy to get caught up in the back and forth and fail to understand something the other person's saying, and regardless of which one's in the right, both often come away with the impression that the other is intentionally refusing to listen, even though that's not exactly what's going on.

I really think the best you can do in that case sometimes is just to drop the subject, and if they ignore clear requests to do that, at some point it's more effective just to stop responding.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Nov 1, 2018 8:49 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> The more frequent case is that it's one of those technical disputes where people are just talking past each other.

"Just listen to what I'm actually saying, not what you're hearing". You need a 3rd-party to step in and moderate, and say "this is the real issue".

That's one of my big bug-bears in normal life too - people assume they know what I'm going to say, and never wait for me to say it (when actually, I'm usually going to say something rather different ...)

Cheers,
Wol

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 27, 2018 22:14 UTC (Sat) by mansr (guest, #85328) [Link]

Maybe he was thinking of the Nick Krause ordeal.