alt Hacker NewsPerhaps he should be. This idea that we should tolerate terrible things and only respond to them politely seems to produce bad outcomes, for some mysterious reason.
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I am not convinced of this. Being rude and insulting someone’s intelligence is rarely a good trait. Linus got away with it due to the unique circumstances: leader of an incredibly popular open source project and a gatekeeper to a lot of access to it.
My argument against how he handles things has always been that while it may seem effective, we do not know how much more effective he would be if he did not curse people out for being dumb fucks.
And it doesn’t seem like this is a requirement for the job: lots of other project leaders treat others with courtesy and respect and it doesn’t seem to cause issues.
The reality is that it is easy to wish more people were verbally abusive to others when it isn’t directed at you. But soon as you are on the receiving end of it, especially as a volunteer, there is a greater than not chance that you will be less likely to want to continue contributing.
The problem with that is always people.
Because one person is judging that "terribleness" before being entitled to flame, changes to that person influence their ability to objectively make that assessment.
Say, when their project becomes popular, they gain more power and fame, and suddenly their self-image is different.
Hence it usually being a more community-encouraging approach to keep discussions technical without vitriol.
Flaming is unnecessarily disruptive, not least because it gives other (probably not as talented) folks a license to also put their worst impulses to text.
Any analysis of Github's functionality that begins and ends with blaming individuals and their competency is deeply mistaken while being insulting. Anyone who has ever worked at a large company knows exactly how hard it is for top performers to make changes and it's not difficult because the other people are stupid. At least in my experience, almost everyone holding this "they must be stupid" opinion knows very little about how large organizations make decisions and knows very little about how incentives at different levels of an org chart leads to suboptimal decisions and results. I would agree with you that being overly polite helps no one, but being correct does, and what they initially wrote isn't even right and it's also insulting. There's no value in that.