About stop energy
ervin | June 25, 2008 | 20:23If anyone out there wonder why Aaron Seigo’s blog is down, the reason is pretty simple… Its author got burnt out because of some of the poisonous people in our project. The story started several weeks ago (probably even months ago) with constant
bashing of some of the decisions taken in the Plasma project (which is not a one person project by the way). It culminated last week with very rude and useless mail threads on kde-devel, and yesterday on the dot with personal attacks.
That’s why Aaron decided to retire from the public and do what he truely loves: code. No more blogs, minimal involvement on lists and IRC to ensure coordination with the other developers. That’s what we obtained after those weeks of angry poisonous mobs. You might think: “well you can ignore them”. Really? Could you? Such people can bring a lot of stop energy. Really a lot of it, and that worries me. It seems that the project I love is not a nice place to live in anymore.
When we are able to turn down one of our public face, someone very active and energetic, we really crossed a line. Of course, we could shake head, and think “tsss, those poisonous people, they’ve no idea what they’re doing”. That’s even probably what we did during those weeks of bashing… and still we let it happen. I think that’s the most frightening side of the issue: nobody stepped up, and no actions are taken to make KDE a better place again. Oh, and don’t worry, I have my share of guilt in this story… I didn’t step up either.
Worse than the stop energy carried by poisonous people, there’s the apathy of your peers. I don’t want that anymore! We have to end it!
Of course, I’d like to propose a way out, but I’ve not much to propose. Here are my attempts at bringing some improvements proposing some actions which could be taken (in no particular order):
- Recruit more editors for the dot, as far as I know they’re overbooked and can hardly moderate it;
- To help the dot editors, we have to improve it’s engine with a real moderation system (how come most news site I know have one but not the dot?);
- Write a code of conduct (probably something for the e.V. membership), and publish it as soon as possible;
- Enforce it, especially on mailing lists and on bugzilla, mediating as necessary, and banning people in the most extreme cases.
That’s definitely not much, but that’s a start… More ideas are welcome, but most of all: acts are needed. We must stop this kind of behavior.
PS: I’m not linking any thread, bugreport or mails on purpose. I don’t want to point finger. Aaron’s reaction is a symptom of something broken in our community (in the broad sense, all contributors and users included) it’s just an example (and not the first case). If you want specifics, do your homework and dig our archives it’s all public anyway.
Sad to hear it. His blog showed in what direction KDE4(Plasma) was going and what i may expect after few month.
It might be a nice time to buy Aaron a
weird, WP ate the URL…
http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070381.html
I’ve started a page on techbase which may be useful for the whiners to look at and to tell them to stick to KDE 3.5.9 if they can’t handle the issues KDE 4.1 will have.
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F
Please update it with whatever else has come up in this vein.
Cheers,
Steve.
Well, very sad and would not wish it on anyone.
That said, I fell obliged to point out as a fairly disinterested observer that Aaron seemed to bring a lot of the trolling and flaming onto himself:
- Often he would use troll like titles for blog posts – I seem to remember one recent one along the lines of “KDE 4 will have no desktop icons”.
- He seemed to think on many things, such as the cashew for example that he had the “one true vision” that all should follow. Frequently he was quite rude to people in comments.
Above all my impression is that he is a fantastic developer, but not a good figurehead for the project as he didn’t see able to take on board other peoples views or take constructive criticism and took negative remarks way too personally.
I don’t think KDE should allow one developer to become a focal point for a whole project in this way. Aaron’s blog gave the impression that plasma was going to be the way he wanted it to be and users would either have to see the light or suck it up. Clearly there are many people behind plasma and decisions are (hopefully) coming out of reasoned discussion, but that wasn’t apparent at all from his blog.
I just wanted to display my solidarity to Aaron.
Aaron, you’re doing an incredible great job! I always enjoyed reading your blog and where Plasma is going!
Keep up the great work.
Cheers, Nelli
“Often he would use troll like titles for blog posts – I seem to remember one recent one along the lines of “KDE 4 will have no desktop icons”.”
He did that to get attention (which he did). He just assumed that people would read beyond the title. Besides, he said that in his personal blog, so he can use whatever titles he wishes. And “troll-like” titles are no excuse to harass the dude.
And while we are at it, could you name other “troll-like” titles he used? One title is not “often”.
“He seemed to think on many things, such as the cashew for example that he had the “one true vision” that all should follow.”
Like it or not, Aaron (or any other developer for that matter) is under no obligation to satisfy the whims of the users. If he thinks that the cashew is a great idea, why exactly should he remove it? Because some user tells him that he should remove it?
Of course users can make suggestions, and if the developers like the suggestion, they might implement it. In this case the developers obviously feel that removing the cashew is a bad idea, so they didn’t do it. If an user disagrees with that, he can remove it himself.
That’s to bad, I enjoyed reading Aaron’s blog (haven’t read the poisonous comments
). And as a user who appreciates what he’s done with plasma and interested in the latest plasma development, I hope his blog comes back online soon.
Janne: It’s not about removing the cashew or not, its about having the *option* to remove it or not.
It’s unfortunate that Aaron has seen fit to close his blog and just go back to coding.
I know from having spent a few years as point person for a couple of in house corporate projects that people tend to get long term and short term mixed up.
Some, of course, are worse than others and do become downright poisonous in their comments, emails and water cooler talk.
I ended up deep sixing the emails from the worst offenders and telling those who repeated the same thing over and over and over again that it didn’t matter a bit how often they said they wanted something it just wasn’t gonna happen the way they wanted it to. At least for this release.
If that didn’t work they were deep sixed as well.
I have only so many hours in a day and I needed to spend some time on the project(s) rather than try to answer the same email endlessly with variations of the same answer.
In KDE’s case there’s another thing. Like it or not, and I’d like it, people are looking forward to the day that this leaves what is essentially a beta, sometime about 4.2 if I read the tea leaves correctly.
The long term goals are exciting and while I want them NOW I can wait. I’m gonna have to anyway so I might as well wait anyway.
Add to this some of the less than helpful blogs out there that seem to think that KDE 4.x is ready to replace 3.5.9 or should be. It leaves me wondering just what the bloggers are reading or thinking.
All that said I’ve been around the block a little and I don’t recall the same level of excitement or anticipation around GNOME 2.x or KDE 3.x as I see for KDE 4 when they were getting ready to roll out.
Sadly, this always seems to bring out the worst in some.
Aaron is a wonderful communicator and has tried to manage the expectations as well as anyone could but it seems that some people just weren’t listening/reading.
To the developers and others who are disheartened by this I’d suggest that you remember that what you are doing is looked on as something both exciting and very important by the silent majority of us out there as we wait for the day we ditch KDE 3.5.x completely and move into a whole new world of the desktop, if it can even be called that by then. (Good thing, wonderful thing!
)
Do your best to ignore the trolls, the terminally impatient and those who just don’t seem to want to get it.
I’d volunteer myself to help out at Planet KDE if I could clear the deck on some medical things. Of course, I can’t..busted vertebrae as the result of a traffic accident so that can’t wait to be fixed.
When it is I’ll be more than happy to help out there if the help is still needed.
Keep on keepin’ on. I, for one, think that watching KDE 4 take shape and grow is exciting and important.
ttfn
John
While I am not a rabid KDE fan(I am more on GNOME), I must admit that KDE4 looks very promising and that Aaron Siego plays a great role in Plasma(which is one of the things I like in KDE4) and his blog posts were really interesting and at times fun to read. I hope he reconsiders his decision and comes back, but if he doesn’t want to, I completely understand.
Ok Well Just to throw in my observations. Aaron has a very good vision for an encompassing future of the Desktop and he is doing it from scratch. If this project was actaully being done only by him and outside of KDE people would be a LOT more patient and it would be moving a lot slower than it is now. I think that it’s a combination of many things that make people bring out the comments –with-acid macro. There are things that Aaron hasn’t yet figured out and he has said as much and been very open with them.
The comments about him having a trolling title don’t take into account that the article itself was pretty troll busting giving as a gift many things that the complainers/detractors/character assasains/outright trolls were rallying around. He even then later went on to clear away the clouds so that it was clear what he was talking about and he still had over 700 comments calling him all sorts of personal names and ascribing him as a destroyer of technological civilization. I think that he is decidedly less in the wrong here.
On the aspect of the now famous “cashew” many moons ago he said that the cashew was a part of the containment he was working on and the containment could be changed (even to have a clock as your background). The contatinment that is currently the default is I would suspect the broadest range of where he wants to see Plasma being used and so allows the Plasma team to implent things for quick and effective testing (Stil have yet to see the Media Center mode but with time I guess) for desktops, presentations, small screens etc. Now all someone has to do is have a new containment and no cashew. The plasma folks are curerntly adding new features at a furious rate and should probably be given the oppurtunity to get up to KDE3 feature parity as is often requested and to build proper frameworks as early as is reasonable so that others can start building on that. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
In any case though Aaron has been trying to put out effort to inform about KDE and got a thousand sword strokes for it. I think a good solution is spread the thousand sword strokes among teh thousands of KDE advocators. Step up and have a say for KDE whereever you can. If it can be online when you see something you appreciate then by all means do that. I’m not saying that you can’t question or criticize but far far too often I have seen changelog put up on the Dot with a huge list of improvements and a single please note this has not been fixed yet and there ends up a 56 post discussion on the one this is temporarily out of order and maybe 12 covering the 20 lists of this will be working wonderfully for you over the next 4-5 years. How is that even statistically possible?
[...] from turning into flame wars. While there were no details on what might be in such a Code, Kévin Ottens, a KDE developer, suggests on his blog that such a code be written, and enforced, to prevent the “constant bashing” of individual [...]
Hello,
I also really enjoyed Aarons blogs. It’s really exciting to see how the technology progresses. Maybe he can just block the comment section. Or better have a KDE blog where the comments are moderated by someone else so the author who is putting himself out does not have to suffer all the destructive critisism. If he, or who ever is putting themself out to help inform the public, only sees the positive feedback as well as the constructive critisism it should become an inspiration to read what the readers have to say.
The moderator needs to be someone not emotionally involved who can just judge the feedback to be helpful or unhelpful and delete the unhelpful.
When I wrote Aaron about the blog being down he even wrote me personally to tell it was suspended. I really admire his patience.
Anyhow it’s good to let things cool down and have more time for fun coding. It’s not my field but being an engineer I can understand his feelings.
I often do social service work and many times after spending so much time and energy people are upset because it was not enough… It’s tough but I say go ahead and do it anyway.
Sincerely,
Dada
Thanks to you and all other KDE developers
Ever since the whole KDE 4.X $hit hit the fan I have been trying to go around and post on as many blogs and sites as I can (if anyone knows how to post on Aaron’s blog since he took it down, please extend this to him as well)
Thank you, Thank You, Thank You.
I have been using Kubuntu for almost 4 years now and I am amazed as how much work has been put into KDE. I have turned into a bit of an open-source zealot as I am constantly pestering my friends and co-workers to try linux and open-source in general, and I always show them the coolest features on KDE when I am making my pitch.
The customization and ability to make it look however you want is something I have always valued and it humbles and amazes me that there are so many people willing to work on a project that has that as one of the main goals.
Again, thanks for all the hard work, and don’t let the naysayers get you down, KDE rocks!
thanks
Steve Lloyd