"The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki

welcome everybody thanks for coming to this session so I'm Evan Tripp lucky I'm the designer of the Elm programming language and I got started on it about seven years ago with a paper called Elm concurrent FRP for functional goos and I was like I really think I can make this functional programming stuff easier and I didn't nail it immediately with that title but I had this idea of this experience with typed functional programming that was really joyful and what I wanted to get out with Elm was like I wanted to take that part that I felt was so fun and make it accessible to other people and share that joy that I had felt and so part of that is technical you know you have to write a compiler and all this kind of stuff but another part is like practical stuff like getting set up it should be easy and that was part of what was important to me having spent a whole day just trying to learn something trying to see if something was interesting and being really frustrated another piece of that was if program is gonna be fun I want that community be friendly I didn't want it to be a cool Club for the cool kids you know oh we're functional programmers and you're not because you're dumb like I didn't I didn't relate to that I just had a nice time programming and I wanted to share that nice time in the same way that I like sushi and I might say hey you should try it out it's pretty nice and so I might say no thanks oh okay you know like it's a that's the kind of interactions like I wanted to have because it was just about having this experience so as I've talked to more open-source developers people who design languages people work on databases people work on machine learning or discussion platforms or environmental sensors however much we disagree on design or what where our goals are we all have stories in common about like having a friendly community is really really difficult and that's one of the places an open-source where you know as good as you can be the technical stuff like you don't have a lot of you ultimately you can't control what's gonna happen and if someone's gonna yell it's like I wish that didn't happen so I've been doing this for about seven years now and I've started to notice some patterns of behavior that I think probably a lot of people who worked in open-source with larger priors will relate to so one is this why don't you just and in elements like why don't you just get the jsapi directly or release an incremental version instead of a bigger release or hey can we derived yes json decoders and the short answer in all these cases is that it's more complex than it sounds like if if there's something that you can think of in five minutes or an hour or a day probably someone has thought about that and considered it and there might be implications that you don't see from your perspective but someone else in the community might have a problem with that it's not obvious to you so when you're doing design you know why don't you just it's like well there's all these different parties that we have to sort of make things work for and I can do my best on my intuition but ultimately even after I spend like a week trying to design something that way I need to go out and show it to people and see what objections they bring and then do maybe do with another dessert so this why don't you just is like it's a it's it's it's quite frustrating and one thing that happens is there's a lot of people who are new to the project so maybe there's 10,000 people who might be curious like oh why don't you just try out this kind of thing and the number of people who know the full context is pretty small so maybe there's like 10 20 people so if it takes five minutes to say why don't you just blah blah blah and it takes two pages of writing and you have to write it very carefully because if you're influential community member people will refer back to what you said four or five years ago and say like man there's such a jerk here here's the evidence they said this in 2013 and it's like yeah yeah yeah I said that in 2013 yes so one thing that's that's common is like well if it's so much work like why don't you just delegate the work right so this is a comment I got in real life and italics are from the person talking to me they said there's another way to deal with this like delegation and then they go on to describe how delegation works and what benefits it might have I was like ha very interesting yes I hadn't thought about that and they described a person who can do all this work and they say there's somebody again that is there italics can also be a proxy who's gathering feedback so like you don't have to be in these discussions but so I was initially very upset about this so like the unfiltered in my own mind version was like oh hello is this the somebody store yes we'd like someone to take unsolicited advice on the Internet oh yeah it's it's a really mean yeah it's gonna be rough and no yeah no one's gonna say thank you yeah no it's it's unpaid yeah it's unpaid it takes the air takes on you you don't have any well I was told there would be somebody who would do this and you know so this was me in my own life like walking around my room just like and that's you know that's not a healthy place to be that's not how I want to look to a community that's not what I want the community I'm a part of - to be either and when I took some time and thought about it more I realized there's actually like a pretty reasonable assumption going on here which is like free rice means you can take as much as you want the rice is free take a lot of rice and so does that imply that free labor means you can use as much as you want well the labor is free but in fact this isn't how labor works if you don't pay for labor you get less and so I think that's sort of the root thing it's like oh well it should be unlimited anyone can help now let's assume it is unlimited that everybody in the world actually and help in practice you actually have to work together right these are highly technical projects are you able to work well together is your goals with the project aligned how much time does it take to coordinate with that person to get stuff done so even if you can work with anybody you want there's still these limitations on like who is gonna be really effective in doing the right stuff so I wrote about that a little bit in this post I think or no sorry Richard wrote about that in this post here of like what actually does it take to get involved and it's like it's it's a it's not just somebody store so you know some people may be thinking like you know Evan you're doing a lot of telling us what's the situation but like who are you to say that and so this is another pattern that I see a lot is like on whose authority and this is actually the title of a post that was sent to the closure community and the post started out eff closure there I said it and God feels good I say it with much admiration and respect to all the community members and then they go on to say some criticisms and talk about the relationship with women and it's it's quite a rollercoaster of a post but what's interesting besides sort of like it like it as a journal entry is that it gets a lot of engagement right so three hundred and twenty comments on the reddit thread I'm sure people talked about it in other contexts as well where there would have been more comments and you know as someone who's been working on an open-source project for a bunch of years now enough people have told me that Elm is gonna die next month that I'm like I don't think you're there right this time you know like I have that that in two or like I have that that fear doesn't speak to me anymore because I have the experience but there are other people in the community who don't have that same experience and like this can be like a scary thing of like man people like aren't liking this thing are we doing something wrong they feel like maybe they it could be better they might get defensive so in one of these 320 comments the creator of closure says I found out about this while sitting down to spend my weekend contributing to the closure ecosystem time spent in Lua spending time with my wife having already spent my workweek on other closure related stuff and I relate to this a lot I've definitely written like hey like we I get there's different viewpoints but like we can't yell our viewpoints at each other and that was my Saturday and you know as you work over the course of the years like there can only be so many Saturdays that are like that before it starts to hurt you in larger ways so rich Hickey goes on to say you know every time I have to process a diatribe like this aftermath the effects on myself my family and my co-workers I have to struggle back from why should I bother and every time it gets harder justified on myself and my family that it's worth the time and I emotional burden now I've talked to some people about this post and they thought different things stood out to me this last part is what stands out because I think a lot of people and opensource feel this way and like would never say it out loud I was really surprised to see it that way and it kind of gave me some confidence to talk about that kind of stuff as well so you know we have our post like this in the Elam community with a bunch of comments as well and I see it not just as like oh man this is hard for me to process but the people I work with have a hard time processing it and then if you just add up all the time let's say maybe 10 minutes is spent on each of these comments what I think is low like a conservative estimate we're talking about like 50 hours for this one that that's just like dealing with someone's anger and could that have been helping someone new or spending time with some family members or like learning some hobby that could get you out of work and get you like a more healthy attitude so one thing I hear a lot when I talk about this stuff is like if it makes you so mad why don't you just not read it why don't you just not read it so another pattern that's really common is that all discussion is constructive you know I'm just saying how I feel I feel like s you and I respect you a lot and you know I think you're an idiot but like I really learned a lot from you and like that's a difficult like personal relations to have I don't know if people have people like that in their life but that's a difficult thing to deal with a lot so one discussion that was along these lines is like should Elm have user definable infix operators this came up recently with our recent release and if we just focus on this question like textually someone might say yeah there are cases where it makes code shorter and more convenient and someone else might say no because it can make code harder to read especially from in a large team and you know text really like this is an interesting area mate like yeah it can make cloture that's a good point and it might hurt people on a large team and then onlookers will sort of say which one seems to make more sense to me but when you take a step back and stop think if it just is like a textual argument and who's wrong and say okay all these people have different priorities some of them may value flexibility a lot and some people might value simplicity a lot and all these people exist on this with different priorities so that person is like yeah we should have this really might value flexibility and the person who says no is saying well if like all these benefits you're telling me about flexibility or like how code can be shorter and more convenient it's like that's not persuasive to me like that's not a good rational argument because it's just not important and it's likewise you know how does it work on a large team it's like well that doesn't it doesn't matter it's not about that and all the people exist on this spectrum is or with different priorities as well so they're evaluating it not as which is the true objective argument but given my priorities which is the one that makes the most sense to me so I've come to see directive discussion is about mutual understanding rather than mutual agreement and a lot of discussions online are like we're going to get to a point where you agree with me rather than saying like huh this person's seeing it different why is that maybe they're seeing something I don't so when I take a step back and think about these different patterns I just think like why why is this happening you know I I don't have problems like this in normal life you know if I'm at an elm conference or a meet-up or like nothing ever is so emotionally difficult as these interactions so I found this documentary called all watched over by machines of loving grace by Adam Curtis it's excellent as is all of his work and that sort of taught me or I found through that a book called from counterculture to cyber culture so this revealed to me a sort of an intellectual history going back to the 1950s that really helps explain what's going on in open-source right now so it traces things from a book called the human use of human beings so this came out of MIT in like 1952 by a person who had created artillery that could automatically track planes and shoot them down and then the whole earth catalogue which was popular in back to the land movement so a lot of people in communes might have bought this but it was a much larger thing than that and then finally the Electronic Frontier Foundation and it sort of ties these together in a very interesting way so we'll look at some of the the things going on here so in the human use of human beings Norbert Wiener introduces the idea of cybernetics he defines it as the study of messages has a means of controlling machinery and society it's a little weird okay okay fine and as you start to read it it's like the this this way of like let's not look at the person but let's look at the messages going around and that's how we'll think about how the world works and so you see things like words such as life purpose and soul are grossly inadequate to pursue precise scientific thinking which is it's like fair enough but also like those things like life and purpose are like pretty important to people as well to consider but you know a person is just a special sort of machine for hey like we can consider it as a thing that takes inputs and does stuff emotions are just a useless epiphenomena that's a that's that's real he said that another thing is like we have modified our environment so radically that we must have modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment so it's sort of how can we take a person and simplify it down to a machine or a system that we can understand well and then once we're starting to think of people that way well we can improve machines we can add things to them and the machines get more capabilities maybe that's how we move forward as as people and life and purposes like that we can't go back to that then it's too different now so the sort of connecting thread and Whole Earth Catalog besides Stewart Brand author of this knowing a bunch of the people in a cybernetics group is this idea of access to tools right so like we're not we we are now our relationship with our tools is going to be how we move forward so this catalog starts with we are as gods and we might as well get good at it so far remotely done power and glory as government big business formal education church has succeeded to the point where the gross defects obscure actual gains in response personal power is developing so he's focused on a bunch of different topics and so education finding inspiration shape his environment sharing the adventure now keep in mind this is written in 1969 so this is before the internet and if you read these points as like what ideal view of the Internet should be it works really well like you can find out all sorts of interesting stuff you can be inspired by what's going on up there you can find a place where you really fit in even if you don't fit in in your local community that has different values than you and you can share that with whoever you want to like there's this place for self expression and so he says tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog so some people have argued that this is sort of like the what preceded the internet had sort of foresaw what was going to happen there and this publication and the Creator Stewart Brand had been really influential so one of the positive quotes is when I was young there was amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog which was one of the Bible's of my generation so that was Steve Jobs there was a project that's doer brand created called the 10,000 year clock which deaf Bezos helped fund with 42 million dollars so what is this like this book that was popular on back-to-the-land communes became very influential because of this how tools and like a rejection of hierarchy where somehow in this new place where we're going to choose our own future through our connection with tools and finally the Electronic Frontier Foundation interestingly the founders of this met on the whole earth electronic link one of the earliest bullet or message boards and so one of the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace governments of the industrial world you weary Giants of flesh and steel you have no sovereignty where we gather I declare the global space social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyranny as you seek to impose on us so again you see this like distrust of hierarchy big businesses failed government has failed we are going to find a new way through this thing so one of the early cases Electronic Frontier Foundation but that inspired the creation of this foundation was there was a programmer called Lloyd Blankenship and BellSouth found that some of their 911 Alexus tum' documentation had been posted on a bulletin board and so they got the Secret Service involved and took some computers that might have sensitive information so Lloyd was arrested and the Electronic Frontier Foundation like was created around that time to help protect people in this situation so after Lloyd was arrested he wrote something called the hackers manifesto which I think gives a raw version of what's going on in this world so he says I'm smarter than most of the other kids this crap they teach us bores me I've listened to my teacher explain for the 15th time how to reduce a fraction I understand it no Miss Smith I didn't show my work I did it in my head and you can see well he says I've made a discovery today I found a computer it does what I want it to do if I make a mistake it's because I screwed up not because it doesn't like me or it feels threatened by me or it thinks I'm a smart ass where it doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here so you're seeing this this guy's 21 when he's writing this he's somebody sort of very disillusioned not just with government or big business but like just his classroom the social environment he's living in and he goes on to say this is our world now we explore but you call us criminals you build atomic bombs wage wars he's tried to make us believe it's for our own good yet we're the criminals so again you see that explicit distrust of hierarchy and then finally my crime is that about smarting you something you will never forgive me for so III don't know how many people who work on open source will recognize aspects of this attitude and interactions they have but there's sort of such a strong rejection of the social things going on it's like well the teacher who's not teaching you well has a bunch of other students and it's difficult to balance all their needs like it may be it's malicious but maybe there's another reason but this world use kind of like I don't smart it like you don't see it how I see it so when I take a step back on this intellectual pathway like things I sort of draw out from reading these books and endings is one where we're gods to hierarchy has failed us there's sort of a deep distrust of hierarchical structures I think you know rightly there's a lot of bad things that come out of hierarchy and finally order will emerge from the new technology so when we reconsider the patterns we've seen open source stuff makes a lot of sense so it's like why don't you just it's like haven't you like we can just through reason and rationality like figure out the answer like why don't you just do the obvious thing hierarchy has failed us so again on whose authorities coming out of this tradition of hierarchical structures haven't served as well we need to find a way that isn't structured in that way like your authority as the author is not legitimate on those grounds and all discussion is constructive it's like well this is the new technology this is what the new technology is producing so this must be the way forward to this place that we want to go so I found this pathway really interesting and and it informed like it helped me understand a lot was going on but it's just one of a couple of different ways of looking at how we got to this level of conflict in open-source so I'm calling this sort of the the intellectual history of like freedom people people were primarily prioritizing freedom but there are other ones such as people who are primarily prioritizing engagement so I want to start with a quote the enormous expansion of communications has entirely transformed the conditions of trade and commerce everything is done in haste at fever pitch the night is used for travel today for business even holiday trips put strain on the nervous system and to people relate to that holiday trips being stressful I feel where I struggle with that at least I tried I try to you know take a break or whatever great political industrial and financial crises carry this a segment into far wider areas of population than ever before interest in political life has become universal tempers are inflamed by political religious and social struggles party politics electioneering finally people are forced to engage in a constant mental activity and robbed of the time you defer relaxation sleep and rest so if you had to guess when this was written let's see it's reasonable it could be this year it could be 2017 or maybe someone was really prophetic and they wrote it in like 1980 it's like I see where this is all going so this is actually from something Freud wrote in 1902 the part I left out is due to the worldwide Telegraph and telephone networks and the immense growth of trade unionism so I mean I think it makes sense that he would have seen these kinds of things he seems like a smart dude or at least someone who's very sensitive to human behavior and so this is kind of where this intellectual history starts so we have Freud but we're gonna look at two other books one is called propaganda from 1928 and one is called nudge much more recent from 2008 so with propaganda this is written by Edward Bernays this is actually Freud's nephew the connections between all these works are crazy and as you look into any parts of these like everybody met everybody worked with someone's nephew or cousin or mom or it's very strange so this book is essentially a bunch of stories about how Edward Bernays should have created the idea of public relations so one of the stories he tells is about torches of freedom so this was an ad campaign to break the taboo against women smoking at the time men would smoke and it was acceptable to some degree and women couldn't it was a very looked down upon so the president of the American tobacco company said if we can break this taboo it'll be like a gold mine opening right in front right in our front yard so he hires Edward Bernays and what Edward Bernays does is he hires women who are good-looking but not too modely that's the the quote I found good-looking but not too modely to walk in an Easter Sunday parade and smoke he also hired photographers to get really good photos of these women and then distributed those photos to newspaper like through newspaper connections that he had to make sure he got published all around the world so this torches of freedom idea was saying we see this trend about women's liberation happening and like this is aligned with that movement in that this is a way of punching up against those taboos but it's very focused on like hey we're gonna sell a bunch of we're gonna make a bunch of money here and so one of the ads that came out of this was an ancient precious has been removed and what's interesting about this ad is that visually it's clearly about women smoking but texturally it's saying toasting did it it's because they toast the tobacco it's less harsh on your throat and that's what has removed the prejudice so texturally they can say look we're not getting into politics we were just saying that toasting is cool and that's a lady who smokes it's like that's I don't see the problem but meanwhile you have hired Edward Bernays to actually run this campaign so oh yeah I want to read a little bit of - from his book this is the book he says the old-fashioned propagandist using almost exclusively the appeal to the printed word tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article immediately so he's like his example of this is like you buy O'Leary's rubber bands now and he's like okay that's the old-fashioned way the modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create the circumstances that will modify the custom right it doesn't matter what this ad says it's about creating circumstances such that the cost we'll change in whatever direction someone pays me to change it so another example he gives is for Mozart pianos so I don't know exactly the finances of Mozart pianos but let's say they had 30 percent of market share and he gets had to make it higher maybe can go to 35 or 40 I'd be a huge for Mozart pianos so Bernays comes in he says okay I could say to people will you please buy a piano but I'm not going to do that I know that pianos have this sort of elite cachet and so what I'm going to do is I want to make a architecture Expo in New York City where we're going to showcase music parlors and we're going to bring in famous people influential artists and musicians to be in the rooms we're going to have expensive tapestries and really lean into this elite picture and promote it in our connections with newspapers he also invites architects from all over the country he wants influential architects and they'll bring designs from music parlors so what this Expo does is it creates a music parlor as a aspirational goal and it brings in architects who will then go back to wherever they're from with designs for music parlors and they'll start building houses that have that and ideally they'll influence other architects who are not as influential to add music parlors as well and so instead of saying hey will you please buy this piano people are now saying have this piano shaped hole that I need to fill like do you have a something piano shaped so again the modern propagandist sets to work to create the circumstances that will modify the custom so this got modernized and sort of made a bit nicer in nudge so here we see a nudge is any aspect of a choice architecture that will alter people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or seemingly changing their economic incentives so this book has been really a fun influential in tech recently so one thing that we're probably all familiar that's an example of this is autoplay of videos so you just finished a show it ends on a cliffhanger because they wrote it that way and you're like man that was that was cool and you're like oh my body is it is it hungry does it need a walk did it have plans for today or for anything and then the music starts again and you're like no no so this is this is a nudge right you're free to do some other behavior but you know through the choice architecture that was created a predictable amount of people don't don't make that free choice so this ended up being popular at Google so if anyone's visited Google Google cafeterias you'll probably have seen and all the food is marked with colors so green means eat anytime yellow means once in a while red means not often please and it's all marked it's actually very helpful you can be like oh I just had one red thing today it's kind of nice but this interest in like colors changing people's behavior was used at Google and in other ways so when you look at the history of their ad labeling you see something similar so when ad started they sort of just start by playing around with colors it's like whoa maybe Green is like fun or like maybe this like lavender purple thing is like the way to go so in a new phase of things you start to see okay well how let's let's do something more like more can it be something more white okay yeah maybe a little more white you know well how about something like a little more white like at all this colors like let's just put it in one place we'll take all the saturation put it in one place and like hey it works fine no problem and then it's like well that you yellows pretty ugly like we could just you know it's still labeled it's no problem and then it's like I mean who who wanted it to be yellow and I mean it wasn't it wasn't really that important and then it's like you know the background I mean people get it they get it so when you search for Italy tour for example everything above the fold is an ad and it's labeled in this very you know subtle and and nice way so I found this very interesting quote from the head of text ads at Google he says we want to make it easier for our users to adjust information on the page so we're gradually trying to reduce the number of variations of colors and patterns on the page and bring a little bit more harmony to the page like we just we just want harmony and that's why we reduced one of the color elements on the page we could have reduced other color elements it's just one color element like what's the big deal so some of you may be thinking like Evan if you're so mad about this you know why don't you just change your default search like you have you typed it into Safari so clearly that's default well another thing I learned when I was looking into this is Google paid 1 billion to Apple to keep the search apart iPhones furthermore these sums called traffic acquisition costs rose to 5.5 billion dollars or 23% of the ad revenue so we're in a situation where a choice architecture has been created you know the the circumstances have been modified such that you know well I don't mind searching in this way or I could scroll down below these ads but I don't really want to so the circumstances have been created such that custom is modified and if we wanted to mess with this like it's gonna cost a lot of money right the fact that I that DuckDuckGo exists doesn't mean that they can compete with these kinds of numbers so I think this whole intellectual lineage leads to something that we see in online communities a lot which is like this things are viral by design so when Bernays starts an advertising campaign all these stories he tells he always starts with a psychological hook so you might observe that people process emotions sharing them with others so that might look like you know someone's going about their day it's fine and someone shows up and they're like that work you did last week it was terrible like it's not gonna work out it was really not carefully considered and that person feels sad and that person goes the the person ailing of them goes away so they might mope around for a day or however long and hopefully they run into a friend who hears the story they're like oh man that sucks but you know I don't think that was really a fair assessment like and through talking it through the person can sort of deal with that and move through another interaction that might be possible as you're going about your day and someone says did you hear about that terrible thing that's happening over there and you say wow that's terrible and then you see a friend you say hey did you hear about that oh my god that's terrible and they see some of their friends you're like man that thing over there is really bad I roll right so when we're choosing what kind of messages we want to put into society to control it as the cyberneticist might say this one has a very interesting pattern right so when you get something has a viral reaction that's something that has more engagement and a lot of people who are running Silicon Valley companies an idealistic way you know they want to make the world better through tools they're put in this trace architecture where it's like you have you know these investors and you don't want to disappoint them there's all these people who work at your company you don't want to lay them off so do you want hashtag disappointing q3 or do you want the viral one so once you have this psychological hook you can start designing ways to make it work better so the ones I sort of noticed have been to mix extremes so if we come back to our priorities graph of different people these people don't necessarily congregate in the same place but what we really want to happen is for the most extreme people to yell at each other as aggressively as possible and so one way to do that might be to put all the different programming communities in one place [Laughter] so if you look at sort of different online discussion forums I think the degree to which different communities collide will predict the amount of conflict that you see there so in hacker news I find that the sort of most difficult most combative place and then on the our program and you'll see more that and on the subreddits for individual languages you'll see less on places that are just community places that don't have accounts that are shared between you'll see less so another approach is to decontextualize the person so instead of two people talking you're you have tango tango talking to Foxtrot and what's interesting here is like when they saw each other's faces they might be able to say oh this person isn't trying to be malicious they feel this way but when it's tango tango it could literally be Hitler it could you don't know is this in Argentina being like in fix operators are stupid unclean so another way to decontextualize things is to limit the amount of characters that are available to people another way is to limit the kind of feedback that's available so instead of saying hey that was pretty hurtful you say down I got a lot of nuances lost in that sort of thing so when I take a step back on all this I think there's a big conflict here where there's very powerful incentives for our interactions to go really poorly and I don't think the intellectual history of freedom really is well set up to protect against that like if you are living in a choice architecture that predictably alters people's behavior yeah you were given a free choice but you happen to choose a different thing 30% of the time so this got me interested in a different pathway so I asked a lot why don't I have any of these problems in person so like at work or at conferences or it meet ups or on the street all these places are for or something right so when a place is for something you can ask what's inappropriate behavior if I'm at work and a discussion keeps going and going at some point it's like we have to stop having the discussion and make a choice we can't be in discussion forever it's clear because the work is for work and at a conference you know it's right against the norms to jump up on a stage and being like that's wrong the idea is like you you carefully select speakers who might have something interesting to say to folks and try to efficiently and in a nice way present that at a meet-up if someone's being really aggressive they're always yeah you know oh I need to go to the bathroom there's ways out of those kinds of conflicts or and you and you're talking face-to-face on the street you know someone's like standing outside Starbucks and being like I had better coffee one time it's like that's weird that's a weird behavior and then and and the croissants could be done better I don't know how but they could this isn't it so this idea of like a place being for something I think is really important and so I had this idea for intentional communication and so the idea is that instead of just having a blank box you're writing to you first choose some intent my intent is to learn let's say and I'll get prompted to say okay what's your background maybe they started using Elm and they've been doing java for a long time and the question is why do I have to explicitly cast between ants and float when doing math and then I can submit the post so when that shows up this question might have been read in a combative way like why do I have to explicitly cast between int and float when doing math or like why do I have to explicitly cast between like both of those are valid interpretations of this text but when you give some background it's like okay I see where this person is coming from I can see why they'd be frustrated with that and it's really harder to read it in a malicious way so instead of just having a reply button maybe you can say okay I can either ask for clarification or I can give an answer and so if I say I'm gonna give an answer again we might have this structured way of replying restate the question answer it and then we can say hey we value citations we value like people backing up but evidence or experience so maybe they give the citation and they can post it and so again you get to answer and the person asking says oh that's not the question I was asking actually so that can really help clarify and make this process more efficient so the MCG again instead of a reply maybe you say ask for clarification or thank the person and so there's a couple of things you can add to this I think that would help so one is the idea of conversation flows so we saw someone wants to learn you can clarify your answer if you choose to answer they can ask a clarifying question or thank you now if they clarify maybe you give another answer but in the other path where you say hey maybe can you give me an example to to clarify your question they can restate it and then you can answer so the point here is just that yell angrily isn't one of the states in the discussion its unreachable so this isn't to say that all discussions should be this way because they're places where you want self-expression you say hey I had a really nice time at the park here's a photo of it and someone says oh that's great that reminds me of some last week we were clicking something really nice and so you can have these cycles but when someone's doing self expression we say man that's really like a terrible thing to say maybe you could have a diss composition floor that says hey I want to learn about that perspective I don't want to tell you it's wrong I just want to know why I feel that way so it might be interesting here is like the discussion flows will be different depending on the goals of the community right if it's about learning it might be one way if it's about self-expression it might be another way and maybe you want safety valves to jump around so another thing that I think is interesting is say discussions happening and it's getting really out of control and it's like hey this is nice and then by the end they're like your mom is a bad person and she [Music] Minoo through a bicycle on the ground I don't know so like this is where you don't really want things to go so one thing that might be interesting is when you see someone about to reply say hey what would be a successful conclusion to this interaction or would it be easier to chat for five minutes like is there somewhere to take this that's gonna be more constructive like what do you want to get out of this another thing that might be really valuable so we talked about private fever site upload downvote stuff when someone gets downloaded they say they think to themselves these people could just can't take it you know I outsmarted them and they can't accept that but the people might actually be saying man that was pretty rude and uncalled for and so that feedbacks not reaching that person and they feel increasingly alienated by these kinds of reactions furthermore these buttons sort of uniquely pick out like I'm mad oh I like that so what we might be able to do instead is say hey for any post here's a couple things that you might notice about it is it off topic is it helpful and if the goal of the place is to help professionals maybe these are the ones you want to choose but if the goal is helping beginners maybe you want to choose scary verse encouraging or confusing verse clear and if the place is about self-expression maybe you want to choose funny and downer so there's a bunch of extras I'm running out of time so I'm going to skip but there's a lot of cool things to do here so some people may be looking at this and thinking if a planned culture necessarily meant uniform but like hey like all this planning is going to ruin these communities so I found this this book it says if planned culture necessarily meant uniforming regimentation it might indeed work against further evolution if men were very much alike they would be less likely to hit upon or design new practices and a culture which made people as much alike as possible might slip into a standard pattern from which there would be no escape that would be bad design but if we are looking for a variety we should not fall back on accident many accidental cultures have been marked by uniformity and regimentation so this is from a book called Beyond freedom and dignity by BF Skinner and I think this is one of the clearest books that sort of recognizing that there are these people who understand choice architectures and that freedom doesn't help you escape from choice architectures like design of other choice architectures is a way to deal with that so ultimately I'm not here to say like here's one way that's right or the others it's like people are gonna have different priorities depending on you know their life and their experiences I think the point that's important is that there's a lot of people in open-source communities who are getting hurt right so like it's hard emotionally to work on these kinds of projects you see people around you getting hurt and just saying well people are just expressing themselves isn't solving the question and we have these very influential people controlling billions of dollars who have particular goals for what happens in these communities so I hope that's an interesting way to think about the hard parts of open-source and I have a bunch of references if you're interested in looking back on things and I hope people will explore through programming like creating the communities that we kind of talked about maybe exploring intentional communication and maybe it will be beautiful maybe people won't use it maybe people will use it and then it will just become another tool for engagement it's likely we'll see but thank you very much for your attention and consideration [Applause]

Channel: Strange Loop Conference

Views: 36,177

Rating: 4.9598241 out of 5

Keywords: open source, Elm, online communities

Id: o_4EX4dPppA

Length: 47min 16sec (2836 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/almostFunctionalLead]

This made me rethink a lot of my behavior. How insightful. It makes me want to do more to contribute.

[u/myyrddraal]

the man is good

[u/PurpleMonkeyKing]

Thanks for this talk! I really enjoyed it, and it provides a lot of food for thought.

I think the proposed structure to ask for relevant background information and to nudge people into writing good / useful text is great. I wonder if GitHub would ever adopt it or if it'll require something new?

[u/mortendm]

Insightful as usual. It's always a pleasure to watch people who have a broader perspective of things. Dialogue and mutual understanding is as needed in software as anywhere else. Differences of opinion is not bad, it just has to be handled properly.

No wonder innovation comes from a thinker like that.