Assholes are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk).
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the go-to evidence that rudeness drives contributors away and that toxic people must be removed from projects.
What it is
Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends justincormack · 2014-02 · on “The GNU C Library version 2.19 is now available”
The glibc team are great people to work with; I managed to get a patch into this release which had been point blank refused by Ulrich Drepper when he was maintainer, and they were incredibly helpful and the process was really easy. So get your fixes in - glibc is becoming much more standards compliant. Assholes will ruin your project[1], you need to get rid of them, whether it is open source or not. [1] [this video]
Recommends Modified3019 · 2023-09 · on “Don't Use Discord as a Forum”
Good call. A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" [this video]
Cites JoshTriplett · 2017-02 · on “Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth”
Exactly . You have to pick: either the jerks, or the people who the jerks drive away. And that doesn't take into account the people who aren't quite driven away but find work that much more unpleasant as a result. If you encounter many skilled jerks, consider why that might be, and why in the same environment you don't also encounter skilled people who are fun to work with. In such an environment, the skilled people who are fun to work with can afford to leave, while some of the non-skilled people may not have that option. So, it's natural that within such an environment (company, project, etc), it'll look like a correlation between jerkiness and skill. People then start assuming a causation
Cites jlokier · 2019-04 · on “On Being a Free Software Maintainer”
Even though bad faith criticism and complaints can be useful, I find there is a still an insurmountable problem sometimes: it can be too time- and energy-consuming to handle the sheer quantity and/or intensity. Sometimes, especially at "political moments" (like elections in a project I was involved in recently - and I wasn't even a candidate), it can feel like being overwhelmed by a tidal wave. If I only have 1 spare hour per day for a project, there is neither time nor emotional energy to handle emails that are so full of demanding questions that it would take 3 hours to process carefully and reply carefully. And if you don't reply carefully, they send you more, writing longer and getting m
Cites Beltalowda · 2023-01 · on “Sourcehut will blacklist the Go module mirror”
> I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is all I have. It's hard to get "hard evidence" for these kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"[1] from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and