This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To be fair, Lenny's been on this matter for a while, and while the "he'll install malware" paranoia is... paranoia, he's not acting impressively here and hasn't been for a while. I don't expect social cons to be willing or able to do a serious debate at length, but kicking people out from maintainership is very much of "take
myyour ball and go home" school of social action.Because a launcher is effectively auto-downloading and unsandboxed JAR code, there's a lot of bad things an untrusted actor could do, and fucking around with git access is not an unreasonable thing to consider untrustworthy. The 'OVE' thing is stupid, but PolyMC was used heavily enough and by enough of a userbase that isn't checking exacts of changelogs that there's been a long history of treating overly dramatic behaviors as undermining trust. See the various snafus over DragonAPI's nag screen or the first and second Wars of the Brass for non-political variants. Tinker's Construct also had a thing where the programmer was actually compromised and everyone went full Madagascar until they could figure it out.
((Unfortunately, this sorta behavior is really common. One of the points of Quilt was specifically to avoid this sorta thing because it's happened at length before, and age doesn't filter well for maturity... and I don't think they've so much solved the governance problem as made their problems hard to criticize.))
That said, yes, there's little reason for conservatives (or even libertarians) to see even the most mildly-phrased 'pro-social' CoC as an evenhanded emphasis on treating people honestly and kindly, and the popular ones are pretty overtly and explicitly not that, and the ability to ambivalent between the two ends is part of the point. And using the flatpak and other package manager/signing systems like this is... not good in a lot of not-good ways: at minimum blurring the lines between ownership disputes a la leftpad, at worst an exporting of the Build Your Own App Store call. I'm not absolutely sure the logo is aggressively meant as a filtering thing -- for historical (bees) reasons, in Minecraft dev world the anti-socon red flag is a blue-and-pink-and-white one -- but even if it wasn't, I don't think any of the people who did it will complain if it's perceived as such.
I'm also skeptical that Lenny could or was interested in trying to make those debates seriously.
More options
Context Copy link