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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.'"
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing
Really? 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 and causes them to abandon projects entirely?
That's a net loss for EVERYONE. The projects don't complete or get kicked way back on deadline waiting for someone else to pick them up, learn the code, learn to extend it, and finish it off. If they ever do, since those same lame-ass trolls and flamers are waiting to pounce again.
This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair.
OR, the lame-ass trolls need to grow up.
Look, I get it. You're 14, you live in your parents' basement, and to you swearing is only nominally less exciting than a furtive glimpse at a pair of tits. You think it makes you sound grown up. Used in moderation, it can. But there's a right way and a wrong way to phrase things, a right way and a wrong way to handle conflict, and a right and wrong way to deal with drama.
The problem with trolls, fanboys and flamers in this context is that they increase rather than decrease the drama levels and stress levels. Rather than putting out fires and being a little diplomatic, they throw gasoline on fires and expect the house to still be standing after the inferno.
Bad move. It destroys projects and drives people away from open source. Hell, the reason I never made the jump to using Linux on the desktop was my own experiences trying to set up a Mythbox in my living room; because I didn't have the exact hardware that one of the developers had, asked for some help, got shouted at "RTFM you fucking loser" over and over again when the documentation was crap and had no relevance to the situation I was asking about... screw it. I'm not going to try to navigate the 300:1 odds of finding someone helpful among that lame-ass crowd in order to try to use F/OSS and I can understand why it drives developers away too!
A german saying:
"Wer will bauen an der Straßen, muß die Leute reden lassen."
Who builds on the street, must let people talk.
TLDR: Was hippy, got better.
It's simple.
In the wake of the NSA scandals, you have all sorts of people who want to support their side (aka the good guys) and make sure the other side (aka the bad guys) don't score political points on them.
So you see all these new and interesting mental gymnastics: "I supported free speech, but honestly it's over-rated. It's no big deal really. Illegal search and seizure?It's been going on for a long time now and we're safer! People are happier with fewer rights!"
And then because these thoughts become a total mess in their minds, they start making arguments that make no sense - like TFA. If it's your server, feel free to say whatever you want and let speak whoever you want. You have a right to to say whatever you want - but you do not have the right to force yourself to be heard. If you say something dumb on another person's server, it is their property and they can expunge it. If you say something dumb on your server, feel free to do so - no one can stop you - but there's no one who will be forced to visit your site to actually read it.
The point of the free speech amendment is make sure THE GOVERNMENT cannot decide that YOU will say whatever THEY want on YOUR servers.
There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing
That's because he doesn't understand that "censorship" is a vague term which he failed to properly define.
I am a civil rights activist. Your right to be free from government sponsored censorship is, IMHO, a fundamental pillar of Liberty. That is not at ALL the same as a non-government entity choosing what comments it wants to display. Don't get me wrong, in many cases I despise the way server and forum owners try to regulate discussions and information... but it's their right to choose what is said in their name, or hosted on their forums.
And if you're going to be hard-line like you seem to be, you'll browse slashdot at -1 and never rate comments.
Except he doesn't give two shits about trolls. He's worried about fanboys:
I can tolerate trolls as itâ(TM)s much easier to handle them. But fanboys are only there to harm you to diminish your work so that their world view doesnâ(TM)t break.
His point is that fanboys take as a given that their favorite software is perfect, and then engage in rabid apologetics to justify their position. In the face of change, they will quite literally invent reasons as to why their worldview is still correct.
Put another way: To someone who thinks "GNOME rocks => KDE sucks", nothing you can do to KDE will change their mind--it's still not GNOME, therefore it still sucks, and they'll create another justification as to why that is, forever and ever.
Since whatever purported problem isn't a real flaw, and fixing it won't make the fanboy happy, fretting over their posts is probably the worst thing you can do as a developer. And if listening to a fanboy can only do you harm, why let them derail all discussion and rob you of your chance to hear from those who can help you?
TL;DR--fanboys don't help discussion, and that's a problem if you depend on that discussion. It's not just butthurt.
DATABASE WOW WOW
OR, the lame-ass trolls need to grow up.
Sure, trolls need to grow up (I know i need to grow up and I like to do my fair share of trolling), but to expect everyone else to change is stupid. This is the internet, this is how it is. You get trolls, fanboys and corporate shrills in forums. If you want to moderate your forums, cool, have fun. But to bitch about it ruining stuff? Really? You just told the trolls that they won by publicly bitching about them.
Be seeing you...
Look, I get it. You're 14, you live in your parents' basement,
Way to improve the level of discourse.
On the other hand, you've pretty well proved your own point about trolls and moochers causing drama.
Well played sir.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And if you're going to be hard-line like you seem to be, you'll browse slashdot at -1 and never rate comments.
I browse at -1 (damn that goat.cx bastard, that lame posting is over a decade old), but I use the mod points I receive. Just a few days ago in fact. I modded up 3 posts I don't agree and 1 I do agree with, because they all made good arguments for their position.
The fifth one was a mod down for a crap argument. I debated whether I should let it pass, but it was a really bad argument. I didn't mod it down just because I disagreeed, I modded it Overrated in the hope the writer will improve his rhetoric down the line.
Even for civil rights activists, I think rating comments is fine as long as you mod up or down based on the post itself, not on your own views.
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.
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.
In the wake of the NSA scandals, you have all sorts of people who want to support their side (aka the good guys) and make sure the other side (aka the bad guys) don't score political points on them.
It's older than that: this is exactly how so many Obama supporters went from being pro-transparency, anti-wars, anti-Guantanamo, anti-torture, etc. to anti-transparency, pro-wars, pro-waterboarding. They have to support their "side" at all costs, even when it means reversing their opinions.
The point of the free speech amendment is make sure THE GOVERNMENT cannot decide that YOU will say whatever THEY want on YOUR servers.
Exactly. Free speech is something we should uphold, but it doesn't mean that any private party has a responsibility to provide a platform for someone they don't agree with. If I have a blog, I can say whatever the hell I want on it. If people make comments on it, and I agree with them, I'll let them stand. If some troll (or anyone else I disagree with) says something I don't like, I'm free to delete it, because it's my blog, not theirs. If they want to exercise their free speech, they can do it on their own blog. It's only censorship when the government prevents you from exercising your free speech rights.
Put another way: To someone who thinks "GNOME rocks => KDE sucks", nothing you can do to KDE will change their mind--it's still not GNOME, therefore it still sucks, and they'll create another justification as to why that is, forever and ever.
Actually it can be read exactly the opposite:
The fanboy, (often the developer, or the developer's hangers on) won't hear any criticism, because such people are trolls, and instead make up any excuse and call anyone names who dares complain about any change, or point out the the emperors new clothes lack certain key features. There then ensues a great shout down from the developers inflicted on their own user-base. The perfect storm of bad user relations.
Instead of saying,
ok, yeah we can see how that might be counter productive for your use case, so lets put in a switch that you can continue to use the rest of the new package but fall back to the old method till we get this new stuff up to your liking
the developer community ends up saying
hey, its free software, download it and fix it any way you want, otherwise STFU or go run Gnome or Windows
Even when they happen to take the latter approach with a coder capable of digging through the mountain of code and making the change, they will not accept and merge the outside coder's changes, and they will apply patches to their branch that render the coder's changes impossible in the future.
Case in point: The Dolphin file manager in KDE4 couldn't begin to match all of the powerful feature of Konqueror of KDE3.5. Early KDE4 adopters were opting to still use Konqueror file manager (as well as bitching vocally). So the developers, instead of spending their time bringing Dolphin up to Kong's capabilities, went in and gutted Kong, and piped it over Dolphin wearing Kong's clothing. Rather than admit Dolphin wasn't ready for prime time, they maliciously removed any ability to make a comparison, any bridge that would keep the users happy. Sabotage! Utterly childish, utterly unnecessary.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Some people act out of pure malice. There IS such thing as people who not only don't contribute, they have a SUBSTANTIAL net negative effect on a project, and they are doing it on purpose. This is destructive behavior and it should be eliminated. Period.
> Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so
> fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was
> YOU ROCK, DUDE!!
Well good for you. What if it was 95% negative? 98%? 99%? 100%? At what point would you decide "fuck this, it isn't worth it."? What if all your mail was "you're wasting your life, how can you waste time on a game when people are starving? go do something useful!"
Also: different people are different. It's not up to you to decide how much crap anyone should accept, because I guaranfuckingtee you, there are some things that piss you off ROYALLY that I don't mind at all, and you wouldn't be very happy if it was up to me to decide how much of that you had to deal with. How would you like to work with a dead, maggot-infested cat on your desk, or in a room with flickering lights, or with loud rap/country/ska/harpsichord/whatever music playing, or surrounded by ugly naked people? What if you sat on a barstool and your boss kicked it out from under you every time he walked by?
Finally: he has facts on his side. Ask any sociologist "do negative people have a negative effect on a group's performance?" and you will hear a "yes" EVERY FUCKING TIME. No argument here -- it's fucking MEASURABLE. It's fucking REPEATABLE. It's fucking SCIENCE. Asking people to put up with bad behavior when they don't have to is STUPID.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't get it. What does free speech have to do with censoring comments on a website? He seemed to be talking about government censorship being bad, and then he said that.
If you believe that censorship is fundamentally wrong then you have two choices: 1) Be a hypocrite and pretend it's different when you do it, or 2) don't censor content on your own Web site either. This KWin maintainer is choosing the first option. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is easy enough to understand: if the trolls can cause him to abandon one of his core beliefs and make a hypocrite of himself, then that's a victory for the trolls and a defeat for himself. It reminds me of how certain nations respond to terrorism by eliminating freedoms -- if the terrorists want to do as much lasting harm as possible, then they must be delighted by that.
.. government!" discussion every single time censorship is mentioned regardless of context. It's a nearly indestructible meme it would seem. You will probably be fired if you tell your boss to go fuck himself and that, too, is a form of censorship. Anyway, this is like a GPL vs. BSD license discussion -- check the Slashdot archives and you'll find that every conceivable point and counterpoint has already been debated ad nauseum.
This near-obsession with treating government as a special case even when the discussion is about abstract principles is why you were confused. Government is only a special case when the discussion is about censorship via the legal system, because government is the only entity legally allowed to use force or threat of force to achieve its goals. A Web site operator isn't going to arrest a troll and throw him in jail so that just doesn't apply here. Said operator might, however, delete certain posts or ban certain users to effect censorship.
I think our society in general is losing the ability to think in terms of abstract principles (part of why privacy is eroding). This is why we have to rehash the same old "but but
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
No the issue here is that he determines what is good and what is bad. Yes he has the rights to censor and I will defend his right. However, what I think he is missing is the idea of karma. If you look at my slashdot id it is an old one! I was there nearly from the beginning. And let me say in the beginning the trolls and fanboys were problems. But then karma came into the picture and problem was solved. The crowd will censor itself quite nicely actually.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Exactly. Trolls and fanboys are a signal-to-noise issue, nothing more.
...and when there's too much noise, it drowns out the signal. Trolls allowed to run amok are an effective form of censorship, preventing anyone else from having their voice heard. The "grow a skin or log off" group think censorship is fine, as long as it's not done by moderators.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Sounds like you're an idiot who thinks that censorship solely involves the government. It doesn't. Private entities can censor things.
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.
Wrong attitude. One may grow a thick skin naturally due to the harshness of the environment, however it should never be a requirement to grow a thick skin to get on the internet, or join a video game's forums, or to become a free software developer. And why should being a free software develooper be such a difficult job when you don't need to grow a thick skin to be a proprietary software developer? If someone wants to spend their own time and their own money to make a product better why should they have to grow a thick skin first? If someone wants to go to a conference and learn more about some computing technology they shouldn't have to grow a thick skin first.
And why aren't pansies allowed to be free software developers? I'm not saying Martin is, but we shouldn't restrict people from contributing or scaring them away because they're too nice. Everyone body should be joining in here, not just just the rude people and those with swagger.
The very premise of "grow a skin" or "grow a pair" is wrong headed.
This isn't censorship anyway. It's his personal blog. Censorship is something that someone in power does, like governments or corporate bosses, or people who act as gatekeepers of information, such as letters to the editor of a newspaper. The trolling opinions are not being squelched, they can be spoken loudly and clearly on their own blog if they like, or on KDE mailing lists, and so forth.
Both are equally the problem. Online communities have a natural tendency to distill themselves down to a single meme complex. People who disagree with the tenets of the complex leave rather than be bogged down by people that would rather nitpick than reason.
Even though neither moderation or editing what shows up on your own site is censorship, I agree completely, that's how you should moderate and is how I moderate. After all, "overrated" is just a polite way of saying "-1, brain-dead stupid" when it doesn't mean "not bad but it doesn't deserve a +4."
I don't care what people do on the websites they own. If there are too many trolls and not enough reasoned discussion I leave. If it looks like they're editing, I'll leave. If the site annoys me, I leave.
As to goatse, I don't follow shortened URLs any more.
The AC above said I should browse at -1, why? I've seen few comments at -1 that are worth seeing. If I want to read one, I can. But even as fast as I read I can't finish the internet and it's senseless to browse at -1 unless I'm moderating.
Free Martian Whores!
If he's trying to badmouth the MythTV developers, I am inclined to believe that whatever grief he got he really brough on himself. They will go out of their way to try and be helpful. Unless you tread on one of their piracy sacred cows, they are a pretty tolerant lot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Moderating his own comments is just basic engineering fail.
If his comments are going to be moderated then it should not be him doing the moderating. It's like testing your own code. You have to be willing to accept feedback that's out of your control or else you'll never know if your stuff is any good.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But it isn't your blog. Your blog is hosted on an ISP. That ISP is again connected to your readers through a number of networks.
All of these middle-men could similarly exercise their right to censorship, because they are not part of the government.
What you are missing is this: When you censor your blog, you are not a _platform for free speech_. It is not your responsibility to be one, but as a society, for free speech to have any meaning, there must be platforms for free speech.
The press has traditionally been such a platform. Today ISPs and network operators must be platforms for free speech.
If you let any non-government organization censor, then free speech is no better off in the US than in China or Russia. Most censorship is done by private companies, not by the government. Self-censorship is censorship, and by implicitly letting the platforms for free speech in society dwindle, free speech is lost.
Its just an open, and free form of censorship. The only way to make it more open would be to say who modded you up and down and why. But this might lead to reprisal voting and politics so as far as I'm concerned peer censorship works.
Additionally the -1 comments are still there, they are just out of the way and can be read if you want to have a laugh about goatse and frosty piss.
Why is it ok to be extremely rude on the internet, but not ok to react to the extreme rudeness by deleting people's comments?
It takes a certain amount of maturity to express differing opinions on a public and largely anonymous forum in a constructive and polite matter, but I think that maturity should be expected - and people who fail to show it should be censured appropriately. Having your comments removed from someone's personal blog because they are rude and immature is perfectly acceptable.
I noticed at least one person in the linked comments owning up to their rudeness and apologising. That is the short of behaviour that should be encouraged, not the development of a 'thick skin'.
It's older than that: this is exactly how so many Obama supporters went from being pro-transparency, anti-wars, anti-Guantanamo, anti-torture, etc. to anti-transparency, pro-wars, pro-waterboarding. They have to support their "side" at all costs, even when it means reversing their opinions.
Bull! I don't know anyone on the left supporting those things, but we would like to know why the right is pushing these things as a scandal now, when they were cheering them just a few short years ago.
Most support for the Dems is lukewarm, it ends at defeating the Republicans. The Democrats suck, but the Republican agenda, socially, environmentally, culturally and economically, is a disaster we cannot afford.
I don't let people come into my house and say whatever they want either, my web server is an extension of my house, albeit one I allow more open access to, it's still my private property however, and I reserve all my rights. Anyone using my server is a guest who's there because I haven't revoked access, which I can do for any or no reason.
nobody's perfect
I don't know anyone on the left supporting those things,
Obviously, you haven't been reading Democrat forums, or indeed Slashdot discussions that veered off into Obama arguments. There's tons of Obama apologists out there, people who obviously voted for him and support him. No, not everyone on the left is like this; there do seem to be a fair number of people, leftists and Democrats (the two are distinct but overlapping sets), who are disillusioned and/or angry with him, but a large portion of his supporters (hard to say whether it's a majority or not) changed their tune, from being critical of Bush's policies to supporting Bush's policies now that Obama has adopted them wholesale.
but we would like to know why the right is pushing these things as a scandal now, when they were cheering them just a few short years ago.
That's easy: because Obama supports these things, and they're anti-Obama, so just like the Democrat voters have changed their opinions and are now pro-war, anti-environment (Obama supports KeystoneXL), pro-big-banks, the Republican voters have had to change their opinions and adopt opposite opinions on many issues.
The Democrats suck, but the Republican agenda, socially, environmentally, culturally and economically, is a disaster we cannot afford.
The Democrat agenda is the same as the Republican agenda, it only differs in extremely minor and insignificant ways.
Criticism is one thing. Premeditated bashing by zealots who have no interest in honestly critiquing, but seek simply to bash your work to pieces because it is not part of their holy canon or is perceived as commiting some sort of cybernetic lese majeste is completely another. I saw no reference to the former in the article, and plenty to the latter.
He's under no obligation to give the latter a podium simply because he's written software.
Acquiring an open, informed opinion can require no small amount of work. If he sets that work as his bar for critique and commentary, I have no problem with it.
"If you say something dumb on another person's server, it is their property and they can expunge it."
And that is how governments feel about their subjects, saying things they do not like on their land.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
In my experience it was the developers of FOSS software who yell at you and tell you that they are not going to fix the documentation because they do not have to.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And why should being a free software develooper be such a difficult job when you don't need to grow a thick skin to be a proprietary software developer?
Unless you're writing that proprietary software for yourself in isolation, it helps a lot to have a thick skin. If you release it to the public, it will receive harsh criticism. If you work with peers, sooner or later somebody is going to criticize something you've worked on.
I will say that at least at work you're paid to put up with bullshit. On the other hand, developing free software can be good resume filler and experience, along with a sense of accomplishment if people like your stuff.
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
No shit, just go to a site like HuffPo and see how many of them will, cheer and make excuses no matter how jackbooted Obama gets because "he is OUR guy". Its fucking ballclub mentality and frankly is what is killing this country.
As for his bit about "censoring trolls"? I have found faaaar too often the word troll means "I do not agree with you". Its the same as shill which means "You like something I don't like". in both cases its total bullshit, and it works to promote groupthink which is great if all you want is a room full of yes men, again go to something like Fox or HuffPo to see a group that trips all over each other to agree.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you really believed any of the bullshit you just spewed, you'd campaign actively against anti-spam filters. After all, nothing should ever be censored, right?
The problem in that case is that it's not the government's land. The problem there is the government thinking it is their land, rather than them being employed by the people to enforce their (those peoples') rights to that land.
Someone exercising their rights over their own property is perfectly fine. Someone else attempting to claim rights over someone else's property is a problem. Government censorship is a problem in principle (consequential problems aside) because it claims a right for the government to control what other people can do with their own property.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Government is a special case because government gets to use violence against you. KDE can't prevent your from posting on any non-KDE blog, they can't arrest you, they can't throw you in jail, then can't shoot you if you resist, they can't torture you, etc. But government can. Even those warm fuzzy governments that wring their hands and feel your pain.
It's not censorship if KDE doesn't provide you with a microphone. Sheesh. Enough with the whiny gimme attitude.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It's only censorship when the government prevents you from exercising your free speech rights.
Entities and people unrelated to the government can engage in censorship, but not all censorship is necessarily bad.
That's an interesting comment. I would think that the only reason that you're still on Slashdot with that account is that the fine people that run it have a fairly strong commitment to free speech as opposed to censorship, and are willing to endure various types of nonsense.
A pity you didn't chose to try speaking with your own voice from the start, but instead decided to ape and harass me. You could have gone with a much better name, such as "deep fjord," or "frozen fjord," or maybe "cold logic," or even "cold fiddler." (Nudge nudge.) Now you're stuck with "coid fjord." A cheap, deceptive, knock off name that will always be confused for me, especially if I stop warning people about you. (And a warning was entirely justified given your initial behavior.) I'm glad to see you making a positive contribution even if I disagree with a fair amount of what you write. Well, at least you'll probably always be more popular with the crowd. And it's popularity that always shows what's right, isn't it?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
To a certain degree, the downside is that this can lead to a big old circlejerk (also-known-as groupthink - also-known-as, colloquially from the pleasant times of 1930's-40's Germany; zeitgeist).
Zeitgeist has been a common word ever since the 18th century, it's present-day definition is given by Klotz (who writes about the genius saeculi in 1760) and heavily criticized by Herder (who probably coined the German translation) just nine years later.
Goethe writes of the "Geist der Zeiten" ("Spirit of the Ages") in his Faust I and Hegel made the Zeitgeist an integral part of his view of history.
NS propaganda occasionally used the term but seeing how they intended to be their "thousand year reign" to be the end of history the idea of a relatively ephemeral Zeitgeist wasn't particularly appealing to them.
Get me some citations that link the popularity of the term Zeitgeist (which as I have shown has been around in a well-defined manner that reflects its current usage ever since the mid/late 18th century) to the 1930s-40s or kindly shut the fuck up.
At first, I thought, is this guy talking crazy to himself?!? Slashdot needs a better font for usernames (maybe something with serifs), this whole problem is kinda circa 1995 AOL Instant Messenger.
Democrats and Republicans are like Coke and Pepsi... plenty of choice, unless you don't want to drink a fucking cola.
There's no hypocrisy if your distinction is one of scale. I regard censorship as only being bad when it has an impact on an individual's ability to speak freely. There is no problem with a single newspaper refusing to carry something, as long as there are other newspapers that are willing to run it or some other (relatively easy) mechanism for publication. There is a problem if a government or an industry body says 'no one may run this story'. There's a difference between saying 'you may not post this opinion on my blog' and saying 'you may not post this opinion on any blog'. The latter is dangerous censorship, the former is exercising free speech - the thing that rules about censorship are supposed to protect. It only becomes a problem when everyone with the infrastructure to host blogs says 'you may not post this on a blog that I run', at which point there should be government intervention.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No it definitely is their land. In fact that is even how land property works in western nations. You basically ~lease~ it from the government. That is how they have so many legal rights over you and "your land"; And exactly why doing things yourself on your own land is restricted immensely. That is why certain land is considered part of the US for example, because they own it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.