Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?
He certainly does not want to encourage conversation.
>Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities;
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments.
It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ?
I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.
You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics).
Why should he care if others use Twitter ?
If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.
>> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves
"Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?
It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.
I think that's the point. With a more community oriented system the line could be drawn at the single user's discretion. Like on Facebook. I don't agree with the author of the article that twitter should die, though.
Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking. I meant to say that the idea of 'safe spaces' can be used to conflate 'preventing harm' with 'indulging arbitrary wants' and even 'pandering to narcissists'. Unlike with physical safety, I don't see a line we can use to semi-objectively declare that one has left one domain of 'emotionally safe' and entered another domain.
Notice that I'm not arguing against the establishment of circumstances in which a person can feel safe! Only that we should pay attention to the language and how it is used, lest we become manipulated into an unhealthy dynamic, all in the name of pursuing a healthy dynamic.
> Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking.
Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one? There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful. Why do you think that something as inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
As for "indulging arbitrary wants"; I bid you welcome to the social network business and wish you will have a pleasant stay.
> Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one?
It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible. Its exactly because of the existence of the first that we should consider the 2nd.
> There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful
Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
> inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_? I wonder what that person might be thinking. Maybe they are constructing false dilemmas and straw men.
> It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible.
I'm not asking you why because I think that the two ideas are inherently tangled, but because I don't understand the relevance semi-objectively declaring a "line" has to the discussion.
> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone.
Where is the line drawn when it comes to damaging one's body? Eating too much? Sleeping to little? Hitting someone in the face? Too little exercise? Bad ergonomics? Suicide? Watching TV? Smoking? When do you leave the domain of physically unsafe and enter the domain of physically safe?
> Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
Surely you can see that this isn't an actual argument, and I won't respond to it as such. Explain how it is radically different and I will return to you.
> Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_?
No, you didn't outright say that, but it's the idea I got from your reasoning. Your argument seems to be that the phrase "safe spaces" is abused, and the only reasoning you support that conclusion with is based on the idea that emotional harm is hard to define. That seems like the opposite of the dictionary definition of considering something.
> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
The idea that emotional harm doesn't involve physical (even if not structural) damage to the body requires that emotions exist in a non-physical realm rather than being epiphenoma of physical states of the body.
The idea that so called emotional 'harm' cannot involve physical changes is not assumed in anything I've said.
The important thing here is that it is easy for reasonable, practical people to agree on what constitutes the act of physically harming another. Your own statement demonstrates that it is not so easy to draw a line on what constitutes 'emotional harm'. Which structural changes deserve the label "results of harm" ? The innate slipperiness of the concept is exploited by those who wish not only to 'protect' themselves from hearing unpleasant opinions, but also to elevate the act of silencing others to a righteous form of 'protection from harm'.
And if you consider being offended to qualify as "unsafe" or "emotional and psychological harm," then anything you find offensive violates your "safe space" criteria.
> The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?
Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
A space where you have no reasonable expectation of any form of personal injury, perhaps excluding self-inflicted harm caused by negligence (e.g. cutting off your own hand in the kitchen, but not somebody else cutting off your hand in the kitchen).
Great! In only 41 words, and seemingly off-the-cuff, you've crafted a perfectly reasonable definition of an 'acceptably physically safe space'.
The term 'safe' should never have been brought over like this to apply to psychological comfort. With physical safety, there is a clear and obvious event around which related concepts can be built: the event of physical damage to the body. We can point to those events, and it is easier to trace back a chain of cause-and-effect and discuss reasonable domains of responsibility.
With 'emotionally safe' spaces, there is no line that prevents the notion from being abused, and substituted for "the absence of anything I don't like".
> It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.
It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.
I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s.
Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.
If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people:
> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?
Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.
Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.
(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.
> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled.
That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying.
He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."
More likely, Alex does not want to spend the time to provide moderation for a comments section. His stance is that Twitter is bad because the kind of community it creates—it would be silly for him to create a comment section that similarly failed to meet his expectations.
It is perfectly fine for Alex to criticize Twitter without providing his own alternative (though he does tacitly recommend using IRC and Facebook instead). Alex is a Rackspace employee who also is heavily involved in the Python community. The expectations on him for providing a space to talk are completely different than a company who's business is providing a communications platform.
I emailed him once. At the time, I was a big python fanatic, and had a few questions about pypy. He never replied. So I asked someone else, and wrote a blogpost on pypy.
Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.
I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with.
This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.
Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.
I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works.
I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.
The article is all about how he doesn't want to communicate with people unless they are in his specifically selected group of people he thinks is OK. So allowing blog comments would probably let anyone communicate, which is what he dislikes about Twitter. So I see the blog comments being disabled as more in line with his philosophy, at least.
His blog comments were probably just like Twitter conversations: impossible to follow and appearing in an inconsistent order. Thus they had to go away. Also the jokes. Stop broadcasting jokes!
And his Twitter feed is nothing but promotional one-way blasts (not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts).
> not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts
A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).
It says send him an email. Maybe you think he's imposing undue restrictions on the conversation, but I don't think it's fair to say someone doesn't want a conversation because they would prefer to have it in one medium over the other. Plus comments need to be moderated, etc.
Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?
> His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article.
Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it.
The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.
