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KWin Maintainer: Fanboys and Trolls Are the Cancer Killing Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community. Quoting: 'Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it's against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community. But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.'"
I read it. Pretty lame, and I've been using KDE for ten years (skipped 4, it sucked). There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing, just WAAH!! OMG, TROLLS AND FLAMERS!
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article. If you get even the tiniest bit of recognition you're going to have that. From 1998 to 2002 I had a fairly popular Quake site that was popular enough that every mega site wanted to host me. Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was YOU ROCK, DUDE!!
This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair. Haters don't hurt open source, and BTW, I HATE GNOME!
Free Martian Whores!
They're a plague on everything, not just open source stuff. Pick a product, look at related forums, fanboys (and paid astroturfer (used by Apple and Microsoft)) will be waiting, defending any issue you have. Likewise, anti-troll accounts deliberately drum up fans to defend positions. The trick to avoid the corporate control and sheeple? Don't bother with online information, it's not real, it's fake, or excessively biased, paid for positions, with a smattering of reality drowned in BS.
Is why there will never be the mythical 'year of the linux desktop'.
This isn't a 'free software' problem. Plenty of 'free software' devs in the world have no trouble with the shills and trolls.
Anything connected to linux however. Does. Bigtime. I'd also extend that to anything that labels and pushes itself under the term "OPEN SOURCE"
Why? I don't know. Noticing reality does not give me the power to understand why, or how to fix it.
What the heck does this have to do with civil rights? Is some governmental agency preventing him from voting or serving on a jury?
I don't know either Gräßlin or KWin. But I get the impression from his blog post that he is unable to separate his personal and political opinions from his role as software maintainer. Perhaps that's the reason he experiences problems and has abuse targeted at him? Or maybe it's just his personality.
Democratic elections are also decided by "fanboys and trolls". Campaigning is the art of getting most of them on your side.
Open source is Ayn Rand's 1949 movie & 1943 novel The Fountainhead: be your own independent architect, do what you love to do, put it out there, see if anyone else loves it too, find your birds of a feather, flock together, and f— everyone else, especially your competitors on similar projects.
Seriously. Who cares about this guy's rant?!?!? Yes, this is the tired meme of the internet giving voice to annoying people.
Deal with it or avoid the internet.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
We get it: you're tired of people not directly involved with your project offering opnions. Hey, everyone's been there. Relax, take a deep breath, and step back from the mess for a minute. "Fanboys"? "Trolls"? When you start flinging epithets around the situation gets worse. Suddenly everyone who disagrees with you is a troll, or everyone who is not persuaded by your arguments are fanboys. Don't give in to the dark side.
I'd say he should get a thicker skin, but then he'll just be a thick skinned fascist instead of a whiny fascist apologist.
The idea of free speech is that the state can't outright ban certain kinds of speech. It does not mean that every bit of speech must be included in every possible discussion forum. In some, you might want to be as open as possible in order to allow the widest range of unmoderated discussion. That was the goal of many of the early discussion fora like the WELL. But in others, you might want to restrict discussion more narrowly. This could be based on topic: on some Usenet groups, mailing lists, and webforums, there are ranges of topics considered on-topic, and others considered off-topic. How narrow the on-topic range is varies, and how strictly it's enforced varies (do you politely ask off-topic discussions to knock it off, do you axe them outright, etc?). It also could be based on behavior standards: do you ban people for personal attacks, for aggressive behavior, for doxxing, or any range of other activities? It depends on the community and their goals.
But the point is that these are all tradeoffs that vary by community, and don't have much to do with civil rights. It is your right to publish a shitty book of poems, but that doesn't mean you have the same right to email every poem you write to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. This is a pretty basic distinction, no?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
ubuntu baby. ubuntu.
its from africa.
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
-- George Orwell, "Animal Farm"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In the quoted blog, Martin Graesslin is basically asking if censoring zero-content hate speech from fanboys and trolls is a compromise on supporting full freedom of speech. It is not. In the USA, we make this differentiation. You are free to express any opinion, but may not do so with "hateful" language. "Fighting words" are forbidden in public forums. In addition, advocating illegal action is not the same as expressing an opinion. Saying something like "The bums in Congress should be removed from office, one and all" is okay, whereas "grab your gun, we march tonight" is not.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
TFS is hideous and spot on all at the same time... The first 11 sentences of the quote talk about politics and not a single mention of software, and if anything kills free (sic) software it'll be politics. Back in comp.sources days I participated a lot in open source software. I did that to make computers easier to use and more accessible to others, and that's the only reason I did it. I didn't do it for that fucking bullshit "democracy" that's become the religious mantra of the westerners, I didn't do it for the pirates or some lame "free as in frieh, oh but not free as in frieee" movement. Only because I'm a human and as a human I like to help others with my skills.
Are you human?
Cut the fucking politics, cut the fucking play on words with "free", and just write good open source software.
Censoring other people in your own domain IS A FORM OF SPEECH!
The Neo Nazis can go spout their nonsense, but it doesn't mean I have to let them do it in my own home. Neither does Martin censoring his own blog mean that he is against free speech. He is exercising his own free speech in his own domain by censoring trolls.
There are any number of reasons to censor people in your own domain that doesn't indicate that you think their ideas are dangerous in themselves. You simply are telling them to take their ideas somewhere else, which we all have a right to do.
Look how well it is doing!
Posting rants and opinions on a blog is a waste of time. Commenting on the same is a productive use of ones time.
Except way too often "trolls and flamers" comes to mean "anybody whose opinion disagrees with mine".
and either you will burnout or none of this shit will bother you anymore because you will have seen everything.
you think trolling is bad? flameboys? how about someone dumping their whole tray of food in front of you and screaimng at you as they walk out over a $2.20 item.
how about people calling you up and cursing you out because they got the wrong phone number?
how about a convicted rapist coming into your store and flashing people?
how about getting robbed at gunpoint at 3 in the morning for $7.00/hour?
how about your former manager getting pulled into a freezer and shot to death, 2 weeks after you quit a fast food joint?
first world problems baby. first world problems.
I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too.
There's a difference between doing it on your forum or blog, which you own, and doing it for your whole country and everyone in it, which you don't.
We need them, if only to show how idiotic we can be. And then we mod them down, where they belong.
This guy can censor his own forum, I can appreciate that a developers forum does not want them.
As long as there are places like /. where trolls and fanboys can say whatever they like for the enjoyment of those who read at -1, everything is ok.
Accessibility is great, but sometimes we forget that when we bring the internet to everybody, we also bring everybody to the internet.
Lots of places I frequent are closing comment sections (Especially youtube channels. There is no greater indictment against humanity than youtube comments) because the robust moderation required to keep public commentary civil is simply not available.
I really do want to give people a chance, but the proliferation of social media and internet access has unfortunately proven what we've known all along.
People are dumb. Really, really, really, really dumb. Worse, the dumber you are the less likely to know that you are indeed dumb, and the louder and more narcissistic you become in order to leave your mark on the world.
I'm not claiming to be smarter than everyone else, but at least I know when to shut up.
Expect to see heavy handed moderation and tightening of public forums. Expect to see trust and reputation systems. Expect to see a drastic reduction in linking to social media and other toxic entities.
One begins to see why the founding fathers of the US didn't opt for a direct democracy. People really do need to be saved from themselves.
Free software, as good as it often is, does not do well in a consumerist society. We believe that anything good costs money and inversely, if it costs money it must be good and the more money it costs, the better it must be. What's more the implied belief is that if it's free, it can't be good.
But depite all that, it's not just people that are increasingly using it, it's that business is increasingly using it. I don't mind, terribly, that commercial software business actually uses free software to make their stuff... I do but I don't. VMWare still pisses me off in the sense that their product is Linux all over and yet they won't make a Linux client for it. (Way to take without giving back VMWare!!!)
But where the whole industry is going is changing. Where things will be in 3 to 5 years will be quite telling of where we're going and whether or not Microsoft will remain relevant into the future and all that. But one thing I know is certain: Things will not stay the same simply because Microsoft doesn't want them to change. And as Microsoft is apparently terrible at change, a pretty dismal picture is being painted for them. And seriously, are people really buying into the "cloud" nonsense?! Especially now with the NSA controlling the world's data?
Free software is and will be the way forward. Nothing is killing it. And I'm pretty sure open source software will be the way to restore trust in computing and in the internet.
A german saying:
"Wer will bauen an der Straßen, muß die Leute reden lassen."
Who builds on the street, must let people talk.
The thing that kills free software is not fanboys or trolls, it's that it's free and doesn't come with enough support for the developers.
The flame wars exist everywhere in life with proprietary closed software and open source. The difference is that in the open source world, you don't have any entity or departments shielding developers from it all.
As free software gets more accepted and popular, community expectations also increase adding more pressure on the developers on one hand, while the difficulty of maintaining and organizing a coherent plan gets harder and harder. It's hard enough managing a project and a team in an environment where you're paid to do so, I can only imagine how much more difficult it is in the open source world.
"I was totally in favour of free speech until I couldn't shut people up I don't agree with."
TLDR: Was hippy, got better.
The amount of people who don't actually know what a troll is, is mind blowing. Having a completely different opinion does not make you a troll. A troll has to without any attempt at valid point formation for his / her side, argue with the attempt to instil negative feelings or total false hood on the given topic. I hate trolls but I also hate people who don't know how to recognize a troll, having been modded down on this side many times for making good and logical arguments, I'm actually worried that people have lost the ability to distinguish a troll from someone who has a valid differing opinion.
As for Fanboys, well if you can make me a good set of points on why your product is better and if you can properly discuss them all with me and make me see that your not just a Fanboy without reason then your okay! The Fanboys I can't stand are the ones who talk about product X like it's the coming of Jesus but then can't talk about why they don't actually like Y, Z and T without saying they just suck.
The best part is, this works with everything! I don't care if your a software developer, home baker, car mechanic or just a noodle enthusiast, you need to be able to form proper reasons behind the things you do and why you do them. I'm not a musical fan but if you can sit down and explain all the reasons you like musicals then I'm not going to argue, we might differ entirely in opinion but at least you have good reasons and I can respect that.
The real problem in OSS is that you have really talented programmers trying to be software and system architects with no managerial, leadership, or PM experience. Say what you want about MBAs, but it is the combination of soft skills, the ability to have a strategic vision, and the leadership (or charisma) that results in people wanting to work for you that yields success.
I am not downplaying the importance of brilliant coders, but the problem with the "cult of genius" that OSS subscribes to is that the "genius" is only relevant so long as the tools he uses to program are not made obsolete.
Is an article on Slashdot complaining about fanboys and trolls ironic or just plain futile?
The guy is a free software developer and his ego is getting in the way. Essentially its "prima donna" syndrome where the reviews are only important when they bath the individual in glory. Yeah none of those reviewers know anything.... but you still read them ;-) ;-) .. Writes a blog...
The short story is that ICT in general has more people with ego problems than most segments of industry. Poor social misfit is valued by the company/organisation ego blooms, man-boy finds himself isolated and lashes out, discovers others are stronger, fiercer etc. Shrinks back into shell butt filled with hurt and rage
Because he has categorically decided that KWin will unequivocally NOT support Canonical's Mir, no matter how many Ubuntu/Canonical devs offer to help with support, he's beginning to receive criticism from so-called "Ubuntu fanboys" for basing his decision on personal grounds rather than technical merits. So he has basically decided he wants to delete any of those criticisms from his blog, and he wrote this pathetic, lame-ass blog post as a justification for censorship. Make no mistake, this is about his irrational hatred of everything Ubuntu, and not about a larger philosophical debate over free speech. I really doubt anyone would fault a person for exercising the right to moderate his blog as he sees fit, but this isn't about reigning in trolls, but simply censoring opinions from people who he has some weird personal animus against. Like I said, pathetic.
Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too.
And from the article:
We need to find solutions to the fanboys and one of the solutions I came up with is to block them on my blog posts.
Moderated forums are not identical to censorship. Censorship is the attempt to prevent an opinion from being expressed. Moderation can have the objective only to prevent disruption of a particular forum, and not be an attempt to suppress an opinion. It is certainly possible for moderation to approach censorship in effect, depending on the prominence of the forum to the topic in question and the concentration of the authority to moderate, but moderation is not necessarily censorship and should be considered in context.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Slashdot is an excellent example of a self-moderating system. It has survived the test of years. I nearly always find I learn something of value on any given article by reading through the comments and discussions here, and the trolls are managed so that they don't disrupt real conversations.
There is a human ingredient necessary, however; mod points are awarded to people who have demonstrated rational, fair thinking. I get a ton of them to spend on a regular basis and I use them judiciously, often giving a +1 "Interesting" point to both parties in a hot debate if I feel they both make valuable contributions which the larger community can benefit from considering. I make a point of not rewarding people just because I happen to agree with their points of view.
Once you set up mod points to a few committed members who have proven themselves, the system is pretty good at self-regulating with relatively low effort.
Other forums which don't use a slashcode moderation format can still benefit from smart moderators who are not afraid to ban disruptive members. There are a number of excellent forums out there which host well behaved members and thus are able to provide useful, informative discussion.
But without moderation and the ability to downplay or outright terminate trolls and fools, a forum will invariably go to pot.
Youtube comments, and many news sites using basic unthreaded comments are often hopelessly overwhelmed by crass idiots. But that's what meta-news sites are for. Link to the original article or video and host discussions elsewhere.
Let the trolls eat each other while the adults talk off to one side.
The pockets of discussion on the internet seem to work out naturally, finding their own balance.
I'd say that open source forums might need an adjustment to better moderation systems if the OP's experience isn't what he'd prefer. There are models which have proven themselves to work.
Most of the time fanboys and trolls and just noise. But.... there comes a time when the trolls are right.
If suddenly you are overwhelmed by trolls, maybe, just maybe, you are doing something wrong. Take Ubuntu/Unity/Canonical or Windows 8 for instance. They inspired intense criticism and hate, and plenty of it. Why? Because the designers were fundamentally wrong and stubborn and refused to actually listen to the user community.
This really looks like it's one of those cases. A guy with horrible ideas gets criticized and then cries and throws tantrums because most people including actual potential users disagree with him. I wholly agree with the sentiment of "grow a pair". Admit you might be wrong and that there just might be actual reasons behind the hate. Otherwise you're just old, crufty, stubborn, and really should quit what you do.
He is a person that looks for things to find offensive, reasons to dislike things, and will do anything for a reason to cry foul. He just strikes me as one of those people that always has this need to seek out a "personal conflict" to wage their own crusade on to satisfy some subconscious need to project themselves as the hero who really knows whats going on and show everyone how awesome and correct he is.
And the term troll is pathetic at best. Because anymore troll means "Person who has a differing opinion than your own". If someone on the internet says its cold out and someone says "No I think its warm" then that person is a troll. Everyone who doesn't agree 100% with someone else is always a troll.
I'm looking forward to all you open-source nerds going Galt!
In a perfect world they might.
In our world, no. Ayn Rand was a deluded sycophant and I'm embarassed anytime some 12 year old her quotes her drivel.
Note: If you're over 12 and quote her, wow. Nothing to say to that level of retarded.
Sounds like he's having trouble differentiating between government censorship and non government moderation.
Free speech has nothing at all to do with moderating a privately owned forum in such a way that the conversations are productive.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
The problem is that the term troll is now thrown around by oversensitive moderators/operators to silence people who offer alternative opinions, whether they be well reasoned or not. This is not trolling, period. Trolling is a deliberate attempt to derail the conversation. However, a troll only has as much power as you let him have. Moderator or user, both can deny the troll his power by sticking to rational arguments, correct facts, and the truth. See a post that pisses you off? Don't censor him, respond! As long as this concept is held in esteem, the only people the troll will piss off are the irrational users who are too embedded in their guilds to care (politics, cars, computing etc all have these). Just dont worry about them. It's not worth punching a hole into free speech that'll just get widened to the point where the forum becomes useless; where the whole site is sliced up into separate guilds that the administrators appease with nonsensical bans on certain terms or subjects because they're afraid to lose users.
slashdot suffers from this too, with people abusing the 'troll' moderation to knock down positions they don't agree with. It's the electronic equivalent of an ad hominem.
John Scalzi says it best on his blog ...
That said, I reserve the right to edit all comments, and to moderate all comment threads, as I see fit. Your comment is more likely to be edited, moderated or deleted if it contains phobic content (based on race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, etc), is a personal attack or threat toward another commenter, is entirely unrelated to the entry topic, features more than a “fair use” amount of someone else’s copyrighted work, has such poor grammar and spelling that it annoys me, is an obvious piece of trollage, or if I find it or you obnoxious and decide I’ve had enough. Don’t like it? Don’t comment. Simple.
A good rule of thumb is to comment as if the person to whom you are commenting is standing in front of you, is built like a linebacker, and has both a short temper and excellent legal representation. If you would a longer, more nuanced idea of what I think makes for good comments, here’s an entry on the subject.
Rest of text here ... http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment-policy/
He thinks he has it bad? Hey, at least he's not on the Gnome dev team. Instead of crying to us, he'd be sobbing in his mother's arms!
HEADLINE: Paradise Lost!
[Germany]
Today, a naive idealist crashed headlong into reality, and his youthful dreams of utopia were shattered. No more Unicorns and skipping down candy-colored, lollipop lanes for this disillusioned, sensitive soul! Turn to page 6 and read all about the injustices this poor individual has suffered because of some mean old trolls on the Internet, and how his "everything should be like, free, man" world-view has been turned into "ve must rule with an IRON FIST, ja?".
Classic.
Come on Klaus, man up, hold your head high, and delete those posts. It's gonna be ok... they're just trolls and fan-boys, right? Right? And for the love of FSM, stay out of politics; we remember last time some sensitive budding artist got involved in politics there. (OK, that last part was uncalled for...)
When I was running a popular open source mod, we drew tons of Fanboys and Trolls. We created a fan site and a dev site. The fan site was open the dev site worked along the lines of StackExchange. I rarely visited the fan site, it was infuriating and demotiviating.
Ayn Rand was an idiot, her theories flawed and they don't work. Provable.
Anyone who subscribes to her objectivism doesn't have two brain cells to think it through.
So, if he had said he follows Linus Torvalds because of his method of
be your own independent architect, do what you love to do, put it out there, see if anyone else loves it too, find your birds of a feather, flock together, and f— everyone else, especially your competitors on similar projects.
Would you have the same vitriol against him?
Because you don't sound like you have two one brain cells to figure out some philosophies are common among quite different people.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
"How about the idea that having a bunch of lame-ass mooches, trolls, and flamers causing nothing but drama increases the stress level of developers"
It's just that - an IDEA. I read things on the internet all the time that I don't agree with. If I post on certain forums I get flamed for daring to THINK too much, I get accused of being a 'troll' (which means "He made me THINK too much, and I can't defend my insane brainwashing, so I have to silence him"). I get banned all the time from various forums, despite the fact that my posts are always polite, no swearing, no threats, no personal attacks - but I dare to question the 'truth' as the scum who run the media tell you, and since most people are brainwashed cretins who can't think for themselves, most forums will ban you as soon as you start to question the rubbish that the T.V. told you. But so what - I feel NO emotions at all when I read these personal attacks, or get banned, etc. It's only words on a computer screen.
Of course, for the cretins who can't think, words on a computer screen are too much for them to bear, so they have to BAN people for making them think.
What has changed is that now you're one of the builders, rather than one of the activists.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So let me get this strait... while he's a citizen, submitting to power, freedom of speech is the most important right we have. Then, once he gains a leadership role of a community that has freedom to say whatever it is they want, suddenly that right isn't so appealing? Excuse me while I fall out of my chair laughing at his dumb ass.
I was talking about this same issue just yesterday. One of the biggest problems the open source community has is misinformation, both for and against certain items. Plenty of people make strong statements about things they obviously don't understand and it means there is a huge noise:signal problem in open source circles. The amount of valid information and useful posts is pretty tiny compared to the amount of damaging or useless drivel. In that I agree with the Kwin fellow.
On the other hand, censoring posts on a tech forum or bug tracker has nothing to do with freedom of speech, nor democracy. Freedom of speech gives people the right to express themselves publicly without government interference. It doesn't give people the right to spam bug trackers and forums with their useless/angry/fan boy posts. These are two completely different topics and it doesn't speak well of the OP judgment that he's confusing them.
... Except that your competitors have access to all your source and can incorporate any of it they want into their own project, so, no, not "f--- everyone else" - not contributing to someone else's project is not a "f--- you". Geez. Entitled much?
SOME slashdoters want insights into how to passage the rapids of Information Technology. Possibly MOST. At the least it is about learning from other people's mistakes. So in the middle of a (possibly) heated _discussion_ about foo one or more twerps barge in. They have mouths but not ears. I'll just repeat that: They have mouths but not ears. (Their brains may be a bit tiny as well.) Now if I was in a pub I could stand up and tell them to DIAF and leave their betters to fix problems on behalf of everyone. (IME this works if you have at least one supporter who is fully behind you at the time.) The equivalent in the Internet/Forum/Developer Café is some sort of censorship.
I'm all for it. If you're in the elite then you should open your doors to the others but don't be afraid to 'Blackball' the scum that poison proper and necessary discussion.
Freedom of speech means having the freedom to tell people being idiots to shut the fuck up. This man isn't a governmental entity, he can certainly make his own value judgments on which opinions he cares to hear or not.
At the same time, having freedom of speech does not mean that other people even have to LISTEN to you.
Yes, Objectivism is equally retarded no matter who its source was.
If you have some system like Slashdot's which moves junk comments to lower rating positions, this isn't a problem. Everybody should get to blither, but nobody should have to read or listen to their blithering.
Ayn Rand was an idiot, her theories flawed and they don't work. Provable.
Anyone who subscribes to her objectivism doesn't have two brain cells to think it through.
Speaking of fanboys and trolls! Any time Ayn Rand gets mentioned on /. this shit gets posted. Someone must have a script or something.
Ayn Rand's fictional work and her philosophy of objectivism are different bodies of work, and separable. Objectivism has not held up well to philosophical argument, but then most ideas don't. Her fiction is, well, fiction: take it for what it is, interesting stories, grounded in her negative real-world experiences with Totalitarianist Communism.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But if you ask them if people talking in a movie is annoying when they want to watch the movie, HELL YES they cry.
When asked if trucks or industry should be disallowed in their neighbourhood because of the noise, HELL YES, they cry.
When it's noise making THEIR life hell, they sure as hell know why it must be banned where inappropriate.
But when it's THEIR NOISE? Hell no. Freedom of Speech Uber Alles!!!!
After all, Merika is the ONLY country that has an ENUMERATED RIGHT to free speech, therefore, since Merika is THE GOD DAMNED BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD EVAH!!!!, then that MUST mean that Freedom of Speech MUST be sacrosanct and From God Himself!!!! (only to the extent to which it applies in the USA, terms and conditions apply).
Die können meist nicht mehr als mit Meinungen zu schubsen und manche versuchen sich darin bis zur Resonanzfrequenz zu kommen. Einfach übermäßigen Enthusiasmus bremsen und unbewiesene Behauptungen nicht akzeptieren und man nimmt ihnen den Wind aus den Segeln. Das rüttelt noch nicht an der freien Meinungsäußerung (welche nur ggü. staatlichen Stellen geltend gemacht werden kann), kostet allerdings Aufwand den man eigentlich lieber woanders reinsteckt.
There's a slight difference between a person whose entire philosophy is based upon the worship of sociopathic behavior and someone who simply doesn't take crap from people over how he maintains the largest distributed project in the world. That, and the open source nature of the Linux kernel shatters any hope of making a strong parallel with Ayn Rand, no matter how much of a dick Linus can be sometimes.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
They are not trolls, they are shills hired by Microsoft and similar companies to damage free software and steer its development into wrong directions.
I (Alex Belits, #437) now can't post more than twice a day under my name because some of their teams kept moderaring down my comments until my karma went negative and Slashdot "punishment" triggered. All for debuking Wayland crap.
So censorship happens anyway, but keeping the veneer of "democratic" system just gives them tools to do it with money and dishonesty.
I agree and the thing that struck me about the quote that he believed free speech meant tolerating other speech. Free speech means prohibiting government from retaliating. It absolutely has nothing to do with people "tolerating" speech of others. As you said the Nazi's can (in my words) go fuck themselves. I'm not going to listen to them and I'm NOT going to tolerate their speech. That doesn't mean I support government censorship or physical violence but I'm NOT going to give their comments equal weight, I'm NOT going to allow them to speak hatred from my property and I'm not going to listen to them spouting hatred in public.
Free speech doesn't mean tolerating speech you find offensive. It is strictly about government trying to restrict speech. I'm entirely confused by this idea that's arisen in the last decade or two (primarily with Millennials in my experience) that free speech means tolerating speech. It doesn't. Being forced to "tolerate" speech you find offensive is IMO abusive and completely against the intent of free speech.
Her fiction is like that of L Ron Hubbards. It feeds into her stated positions on politics or religion.
This can be especially hilarious in the case of L Ron Hubbard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can't retrieve my account login from where I am at the moment - but I thought I'd chime in:
The principals of democracy need not be applied to every endeavour - particularly such largely personal endeavours driven by small numbers of highly motivated individuals practicing their craft for no reward.
Where is it written that when I release something into the wild that I also need to permit people to bash me or my work - imperfect as it is, when I control the medium that they're using to do so? It's no different to having someone at a house party causing trouble - you're within your rights to ask them to leave the house - it doesn't impinge on their free speech - they can exercise it, just that they have to do it somewhere else. I can then exercise my right to not engage those people if it suits me - and that's what has happened here.
If there's enough genuine discord, a fork will occur, the people who complained will follow it and people on both sides of the split are happy and peaceful - and as long as people are mature enough to cross-port each others innovations where they are mutually agreeable, everybody wins.
A message board, mailing list or any other internet medium isn't a ballot box - removing members from an online community you run who aren't perceived to be contributing positively will improve things for those who do care and have a vested interest and ensures that people who are donating their energy and time for free to the world can continue to feel good about doing so. Every time a disagreement occurs in the OSS community we need to be sensible enough to not race towards demonstrating Godwin's law.
Some people can't take the idea that others don't want to hear what they have to say, but that's life. It doesn't belie fascism, nobody is getting black-bagged in the night.
-Steve Gray
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM
IMO, that is the end of the discussion if "censorship is warranted".
brandelf -t FreeBSD
An implicent part of the freedom of speech is the freedom to ignore or to not hear what someone is saying.
To that end, while it is wrong to censor people and make it harder for others to hear what they have to say... there is no problem with empowering people to selectively ignore people.
The distinction is that a censor will decide for you what you do or do not what to hear while YOU personally decide what you do or do not what to hear.
We could go further by allowing individuals to personally elect or appoint censors. Say you trust someone to decide what should and should not be blocked. But that's it.
Are trolls and fanboys an issue in ANY community? Yes. But the proper solution is to empower the community itself to determine who is a troll or a fanboy or whatever term you wish to use and who is not. It is not the right or responsibility of some overriding organization to make that determination.
Some sort of "admin" is fine on a forum or private community social networking system. But as a general rule in free society, speech must remain free... as must the right to ignore.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You are *not* entitled to your opinion -- you are entitled to your *informed* opinion.
I don't think haters are any different than fan boys. I'm not talking about people who boycott an organization because they don't like the organization's practices. I'm talking about those who hate something because it sucks or it is popular to hate. The beauty of open source software is that if you hate it, you didn't pay for it, and are free to change it or fork it. In this case, I think the KDE developer in question would be best off ignoring fan boys, haters, and trolls. Don't feed the trolls are very wise words. I think fan boys and haters joining OSS project's discussions qualify as trolls in this case, because it seems the OP is saying they are just stirring the pot and not adding anything useful to the discussion. It could also be the people the OP wants to "censor" have some valid critical opinions the OP doesn't want to hear.
In this day and age anyone not pathologically idiot can set up a blog and publish his opinion to the world. Moderating a forum or a mailing list does not prevent the publication of a given opinion.
Just look at the Streisand effect and see how even the US government did not manage to shut down wikileaks. Censorship is almost impossible nowadays for opinions that some people want to hear.
Moderating a forum is what we call an editorializing process. When I come to, for instance, KWin support forums, I expect to see discussions about KWin bugs and workarounds, not opinion for or against Obama. This is not to see that I refuse that people who want to talk about Obama can do it, but not in this place. There are numerous other venues on the web to do so.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If it doesn't add value to the conversation, it's probably spam, or at least doesn't belong in a permanent archive. One problem is the subjective nature of such a decision. Another is how much time it takes to decide when one must process large numbers of comments. I don't see this as a free speech issue. They can "speak"...elsewhere.
IMO there are speech that deserve censorship.
In 1934, fascists groups almost succeeded a coup in France, their own divisions being the reason why they did not take power. France was leaning the same way as Spain, Italy and Germany, but decision was taken to forbid fascists groups in 1936. In the end, France had its own fascist regime in 1940, but a military defeat had been required to get there.
Of course drawing the line between limiting the ability fascists ideas to spread, and abusive censorship is not easy and should be watched carefully by the people. But I do not think it should be bluntly discarded.. WWII taught us that some speech can really hurt beyond words
The problem with the internet is that violence isn't a part of the reality.
When this changes, you might find people don't use anonymity as an excuse to be a fucktard.
Maybe there could be a device men/women have to hook into their sex organs to be able to use the internet, whenever they get so many negative votes ZAP tazed in the nuts.
Seriously though, anything that would insight violence in real life should be censored out / deleted, couldn't agree more. I dunno how many times I've read "faggot", "ginger", "redncek" or "nigger" on youtube, fact is these people wouldn't be alive/healthy if they acted like that in line at the supermarket or paying bills.
If only personal responsibility were favored over entitlement. That is, reasonable use (of speech) outweighed the "right" to not be offended. To clarify, we'll probably end up giving people 25-life for racial slurs/violating someones constitutional "rights" instead of guiding the kid/troll to a more acceptable style of communication. Trolls might think about what they say online if they had a mandatory sensitivity class to attend due to hate-speech... but no, we'll likely end up treating them like they murdered a bus full of kids and putting them in prison with violent criminals and sexual predators because they violated someone's "right to not be offended".
Yes, I said that "some philosophies are common among quite different people" because I am not claiming Rand and Torvalds are similar in their actual view of the world. But they both can be described by the part I first quoted. Many people could be.
Actually, my biggest problems with Ayn Rand were:
1) Her novel The Fountainhead was as subtle as a ton of bricks falling on your head; and
2) She was a hypocrite who didn't actually live according to the philosophy of Objectivism. She used it to rationalize being a horrible person, rather than follow it like Howard Roark did in the novel.
I don't have a problem with Objectivism itself. It's just another philosophy.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
This comes as no surprise, since progressives have historically disdained freedom while giving lipservice to it.
-- Jimtown Kelly
Between 1999 and 2005 I stopped going to 3 of my 4 favorite hobby sites. I used to be opposed to censorship (really moderation). But, with no 'parenting' 3 of the sites drove anyone out seeking just some nice smoozing or discussion over common interest; they were replaced by personal vendettas, political wars (both intra-hobby and society in general). It became impossible to be neutral in such an environment. The 4th site is overly moderated (moderately so : ) , but at least I can go there and not be attacked or have to see other members wage war.
Of the other 3 sites, one is still going on, it declined for a while but picked up. On one the Forums Section currently gets about 1 new post a month. It used to be the biggest most active website on in the field, with hundreds of posts a day. One is a Yahoo Group. It declined significantly, and is now on life-support. (Yes, most Yahoo Groups are deceased or on life-support).
I think un-moderated forums run the risk of self destruction. I used to be opposed to moderation. Moderation, applied wisely, is the best way. (Yeah, where do we get that many wise people).
See Monty Python, The Argument Sketch
Trolls and fanboys are a cancer, but most users of a forum don't have the IQ to identify posts of this type. It is THEY that are the problem, NOT the trolls and fanboys. Why? Because the thread derailing that occurs when cretins respond to troll and fanboy posts causes the forum disruption.
The people running forums beg ordinary users NOT to respond, but this is a waste of time. Most ordinary users are just too thick. This is when a good owner or moderator steps in, and eliminates the troll and fanboy posts. The best strategy is to have a forum sub-section were troll/fanboy posts are moved to, so no-one gets to cry 'censorship'.
The controversy arises precisely BECAUSE the ordinary user is so thick. Too many of them want to defend the trolls and fanboys because they cannot recognise the sociopathic behaviour such posts represent. Indeed, it is even worse than this. Because troll posts and fanboy posts generate the most responses, thickies think such discussions are actually enhancing the sense of community. These thickies don't care that the noise-to-signal ratio explodes. They simply want to be in a place where their pointless one line addition to a useless thread makes them feel like a participant.
A tech forum needs a fist of iron to keep it on-topic. People that simply want a good mindless yak should be given an 'off-topic' forum, or be told bluntly to go elsewhere.
And look at Slashdot, for god's sake. Almost every discussion here has massive threads discussing some 'funny' posting. People whose only ability to contribute is to dribble onto their computer screen.
They are neither Fanboys or Trolls but professional disrupters hired by or benefiting from a relationship with the major propritary software vendors. They regularly change position and identities so as to shut down legitimate discourse.
AccountKiller
My house, my rules. Same for my blog or my forum.
It is absolutely, perfectly ok to censor anything I run on my servers in any way I want. If you don't like it, run your own server, where you can say whatever you want.
Really, I thought this was so blatantly obvious that it doesn't require explanation or justification. I'm shocked that people even discuss the point.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Freedom of speech does not mean I must provide you with a microphone. Moderating forums and mailing lists is not censorship.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
One persons troll is another persons freedom fighter.
Then there's the part in the book where the architect blows the building up because they didn't follow his plans exactly. Apparently to Ayn Rand artistic sensibilities trumped property rights.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Everybody thinks that people who disagree are, to some degree, 'Fanboys' or 'Trolls' etc. and, sadly, many people throughout history have claimed to support "freedom" or "free speech" .... with exceptions for the "obviously" extreme who can clearly and legitimately be suppressed. There's nothing new here at all.... people who want to look like "good guys" while suppressing opposing views always start by tagging tagging the other speech as illegitimate
If you think you are wrong on a subject (and you have a functional brain and are intellectually honest), you would change you position/belief.... therefore, when you encounter a person who opposes you it's only natural to presume that the other person is the one who is "wrong". Many people naturally extend this to the point of presuming the other person is "Evil" or at least "Bad" and slapping labels on them. As a result, everybody who suppresses speech feels justified in doing so; it has always been this way.
All that being said, however, we need to throw-off some of the the mental disorders the political left introduced into America in the 1960s.... and this is related to a big one of those: Before the 1960s, we all knew that there was a clear difference between [a] "free speech" in a public forum and [b] speech in a private forum, and that there was a clear difference between [a] government suppression of speech and [b] a private party choosing not to sponsor speech it opposes. With the rise of the hippies and the college campus activists of those times (which often involved private colleges) it served the needs of the "activists" to blur those lines. The more traditional (pre-hippies) American position would be to say government could not censor speech in a public forum, but the operator of a cafe or a web site would be clearly within his rights to keep things within whatever bounds he chooses and suppress anything he disagrees with; Historically, the right to free speech also included not being forced to host speech you disagree with, and the right to free association also included the right not to associate.
What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way?
You got old.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I find KDE4 to slow to be usable and feel annoyed that I have to use an old, hackyish DE on my "fast enough" (ivy i7, gt650M, 8 GB ram) laptop.
Could someone please do something about this, or is it too late for trying to fix the codebase?
There's exactly one K-program I use sometimes and it brings kde4d and a few other daemons running in the background with it. Argh.
The KDE itself looks good and is easy to use.
..that's what we need. The NY finance elite will do the licensing. When (meaning all the time) there is war, Lockheed Martin Correctness Inc. will do the licensing of all messaging related to the liberation of cavemen with hellfire missiles.
Martin is simply a little rodent who has been bought by the ruling mafia of the Imperium Americanum.
via ZuckerBook. He's such as nice fellow he wants to report your liking to the Ft Meade Stasi.
Listed in no particular order, these are the TOP 40 Fanboys, Trolls, and Zealots on Slashdot:
tomhudson, oakgrove, TheSimkin, westyvw, Duncan J Murray, Rubycodez, Clarious, gestalt_n_pepper, DaMattster, gumpish, betterunixthanunix, Alex Belits, jedidiah, symbolset, gweihir, GNUALMAFUERTE, bmo, Runaway1956, Darkness404, Jeremiah Cornelius, mlwmohawk, Microlith, Bert64, Twitter, OhANameWhatName, Gothmolly, Serviscope_Minor, VortexCortex, c0d3g33k, MightyMartian, Tough Love, tuppe666, Supp0rtLinux, Hatta, h4rr4r, Mike Frett, RayMorris, pinkushun, magic maverick, yahwotqa.
yesterday a squirrel fell through my roof (somehow) and was a prisoner in my house. ...
when i opened all doors and windows (so it would have an escape route) i proceeded
to (carefully) "shoooee-shoooe" it away with a broom
do you know what it did? it attack me and tried to bite me in the neck.
unfortunately it then got stuck under the fridge and when i moved the fridge i accidentally (probably)
broke its back.
i used the biggest rock i could find to put it out of its misery.
it has now been buried under its favorite tree.
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to developers: imagine comments are posted in a unknown language that just happens to look
very much like engrish : )
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p.s. i moved out of my cave to get a android jelly bean phablet (samsung) yesterday and the (gui) interface is AWESOME!
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yours truly
gnome 2.x user / MATE supporter.
You want world-class Fanbois and Trolls? Develop for Apple instead.
If you censor out the fanboys and trolls, you'd be left with only about a dozen posts. ;)
How dare you try to limit my ability to use my free speech. Why not change change your message to say: N*ggers and Jews are the cancer Because the label you are attempting to put to a "people" is intolerance and discriminatory. And we're not tolerant of those who are intolerant.
That said, I don't see how allowing something in public and allowing something in a privately owned place are inextricably linked politically. There is an unnecessary and false assumption here that if one supports the public civil right to free speech, they must allow people to come into their home and say anything they please.
Freedom of speech has never, ever been free of consequences. I support the legal protection of free speech because I don't believe the government has or should have a right to dictate which ideas are expressed.
The point of my support is served properly even when we have laws against slander, libel, perjury, and yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (where there is no fire; it would be reasonably appropriate where a fire existed). Free speech is very different from spreading falsehood with malicious intent.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I think that in many cases 'Fanbois' putting down the competition is fueled by fear. I know in some cases I do it myself!
Here's the thing... we don't all like the same stuff but some things are more popular than others. Most of us are lacking in at least one (if not all three) of time, ability and motivation to take over our favorite projects ourselves. If we perceive that the competition is getting all the users... well.. maybe the developers will start giving up. Maybe the project we like will go away. So... we oppose the competition in any way we can.
For example... I don't like Gnome very much. Most of the reasons are things I could change by customizing it but Gnome isn't even all that easy to customize. You have to (the last I checked, it's been a while) install an extra program that then allows you to edit things in a big jumbled up thing that looks like the Windows registry. (I don't like registries). Plus, for any distro I have tried, Gnome's defaults are almost exactly opposite of what I prefer.
Now... I know that many people do like it that way. They like the default options. They like the simplicity of not having many options staring them in the face. They aren't stopping me from using KDE. But... since Ubuntu chose Gnome it seems like 'everybody' is using it. What if the KDE developers stopped bothering? Then I would eventually HAVE to use Gnome. So.. I enjoy putting Gnome down. Because I REALLY don't want a future where I am stuck with it.
I don't like Mir or Wayland. I know they will lead to better performance for games and such. I know that that is a good thing. I don't have any time for games. I fear it will not support remote display the way I want it to. No doubt somebody will implement a remote compositor for it. But I fear it will be a VNC/Remote Desktop type solution. I do use those myself but I also use a remote X server as a terminal. I don't want to just be able to connect from some full PC environment using an application I have to start. I want my terminal to work as it does now, I hit the power button, it loads a minimial OS (fast plus low maintenance) and automatically brings up a login screen to my main computer. It never feels like I am connecting remotely, it's like I am sitting in my office.
If Wayland (or Mir) get all the developers then maybe new applicaitons will not support X. I am a programmer but I am nowhere near knowing how to write my own compositor! If this happens then my way of doing things is permanently screwed! So... I will bad mouth Wayland any chance that I get! Because I fear losing what I have. I would much rather see Wayland and Mir fail to get users. Somebody else will solve the gaming issue eventually anyway, hopefully without removing the functionality I use now.
Maybe this is a generational gap but I don't get it, why is removing comments from one's own site considered censorship?
Preventing someone from propogating their ideas at all... that is censorship. Preventing them from doing it on your own website/blog/etc... if anything that is free speech!
You have your site to propogate YOUR ideas. Saying you have to accept other's ideas there... that just seems like it tramples your own freedom of expression. Anybody can get their own place to post their propoganda! I think putting somebody down for deleting a comment is like putting a homeowner down for not letting people paint their contrary opinions on the outside of their house.
That being said I will also take what I read with a grain of salt. For example, I wouldn't form an opinion of KDE vs Gnome's popularity by reading the comments on their respective websites! I would look for a neutral third party site for that. It's just common sense!
Liberals complained about this during the Bush administration, and continued complaining about it during the Obama administration. There's a very good reason the NSA whistleblower went to a prominent liberal blogger instead of FOX News with his story: because that blogger spent years harping on this very issue while FOX News was jumping up and down about ridiculous made-up stories about Obama's birth certificate.
Rightists were the ones who flip-flopped on these issues. The government spying on us was the greatest thing in the world when Bush was in office, and now that a Democrat is in office, suddenly they decided it's something terrible. They think we won't notice that they completely reversed their positions on this issue if they accuse us of being the ones to change positions. Either they really are so stupid that they don't remember calling us traitors for complaining about this during the Bush administration, or they think we're stupid enough to fall for their dishonest debating tactic. I'm not entirely certain which is worse.
Censoring is not just wrong morally because it hampers our freedom. Censoring also lends undeserved credibility to crackpot viewpoints, because people automatically assume "Ah ha! There must be something to what that guy is saying if the powers that be are trying to suppress his point of view!"
This moron is not succeeding in suppressing viewpoints that offend him, he's making the problem worse. If someone is offering a bad idea, then let him or her argue it out in public where everyone can see/hear. If it's a bad idea, it'll become apparent eventually.
Censoring weightless comments full of flame and troll is more than valid, it's a service to anyone passing by.
Censoring actual critique (aka suggestions) and analysis, even if embedded within crude, misspelled vulgarity and terrible grammar, isn't valid, it's a thin-skinned pansy placing his fragile ego above the good of his product/work/service/etc.
What's all this free speech drivel? It's a blog, a private subspace, not a public channel.
You can't sensor unpopular opinions, just because you find them disruptive. Sure if you eliminated all extreme opinions from community dialog, it would seem less controversial -but- then it wouldn't really be democratic. The censored parties feel wronged and fight harder to be heard.
The majority of any community will be centrists, but they are rarely as vocal as the extremes. The "trolls and fanboys" always get more attention because of inflammatory nature of their opinions.
What are all the centrist going to be vocal about?
"HEY!!! I THINK YOU MAKE SOME VALID POINTS BUT YOU SHOULD BE OPEN TO HEARING OTHER OPINIONS AS WELL!!! CRITICAL THINKING IS A GOOD SKILL TO HAVE WHEN YOU ANALYZE DIFFERENT OPINIONS!!!"
You have freedom of the press. You go and do the work, and pay to setup your press (communications platform, in this context), distribute, promote, etc. and you can put whatever you like on it. This press (communications platform) is mine. I pay for it. I get to determine what goes on on it.
Good to see he's grown up enough to realize this.
Know that some are very thankful for the stability and security you provide, not to mention the price.
Speaking of fanboys and trolls! Any time Ayn Rand gets mentioned on /. this shit gets posted. Someone must have a script or something.
Ayn Rand's fictional work and her philosophy of objectivism are different bodies of work, and separable. Objectivism has not held up well to philosophical argument, but then most ideas don't. Her fiction is, well, fiction: take it for what it is, interesting stories, grounded in her negative real-world experiences with Totalitarianist Communism.
Much of her fiction was deliberately written as Objectivism polemic. I think it's entirely fair to treat it as part of Objectivism.
"Interesting stores"? Nah. Ayn Rand was a terrible fiction writer.
"Grounded"? Nah. Her experiences with "Totalitarianist Communism" came while she was a child, in a family that was privileged before the revolution and fled long before the Soviet system geared up to commit real atrocities. She herself had no adult, practical, grounded experience in that system. Or in much of anything. Which is quite clear when you read dumb bullshit like "Atlas Shrugged", in which the only thing holding back her Nietzschean superman captain-of-industry protagonists from inventing perpetual motion machines was being too kind to the vile moochers (aka the working class) who were holding them back.
I'd say her work reflected her personal experiences. She believed herself to be part of an elite which was justifiably elite, fully deserving of being elevated above filthy commoners, and that it was unjust that her status had fallen.
But I'm guessing that's not how you meant it at all. You need to keep in mind that two things can be true at the same time: the Soviet system ended up being horrible, largely thanks to a single paranoid man, and the revolution which paved the way for him to take power nevertheless happened for very legitimate reasons. Regrettably, history isn't as simple as "good results always happen when the people overthrow their oppressors".
There's a huge difference between suppressing comments because they point out real flaws in software, and suppressing them because they say the software sucks big ones.
The second kind of comment is not useful.
Unless, of course the purpose of the software is to blow instead of suck -- then it's a bug,