On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 01:46:34PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote: > It's social people who put nice forms of speech above actual merit, and > I'm for one anything but social. What I want is for lists to be kept in a > good shape, a job that you're doing superbly. You have (almost certainly > unconsciously) done some social engineering -- that, by sounding grumpy, > you reduce the number of people bothering you unnecessarily. On the other > hand, had you been nice, people would flock for random unrelated minutiae > or even chit-chat. That'd explode your load. Thus, the very society that > touts nicety of speech actually punishes people who do that.
I both agree and disagree with you in this position you took.
On one hand, I totally agree that being grumpy and antisocial[*] is
positive for one's work. Indeed, it's an attitude that myself have
employed several times in RL situations when I thought somebody or a
whole class of people were being unhelpful to me and the task at hand.
It drove them away, giving me a lot of breathing space and made me much
more productive. Also, I haven't wasted so much time on picking the
correct words, etc.
On the other hand, such behaviour IMHO drives way too many people away,
that is not something I recommend in most situations. Furthermore, it
easily opens a can of worms if the place you are being even ever so
slightly antisocial is a public place like a Debian ML, making you waste
a lot of time, like me who spent over three hours only today to write
mails related to this thread. And you need to be ready to hold on if
anybody else starts speaking harshly with you, because you can't hope to
be grumpy and annoying in your writing and still have the other party
that is communicating with you be perfectly polite.
In fact, I see this kind situation happen very often in the Debian IRC
channels, for some reason always involving some German DD, even worse if
there are multiple ones: one person writes very harshly, than another
replies rising the tone to an even unfriendlier level, and in the span
of few lines ones just /part the channel, concluding *nothing* if not
worsening the day of multiple people (because also the bystander just
reading feels something, remember…).
This is way recommend everybody to keep a very polite attitude towards
anybody, unless you explicitly want to offend them (which is a perfectly
fine thing to do for what I'm concerned, just be ready to face what's
coming next), or you know the other party well enough to know their
level of acceptance of your words.
[*] note:
this is not a term you used, and probably not what you intended, but
it's what I'm talking about; also be conscious of the different between
antisocial and asocial
> So, you want your list workload to not increase. We want you to continue
> doing good work. Ie, you being grumpy is a good thing for Debian overall.
Like all things, I think there is a cost-benefits analysis to do here.
For what lists are concerned, it's probably fine. Personally, I'd
rather not see such behaviour in backports, as I think that there is
actively causing unnecessary grief for contributors (I could easily list
a couple of recent examples if somebody wants).
In short: *I*, *Adam Borowski* and some others can deal with grumpy
behaviour and still work perfectly fine; not everybody can, and that
*does* causes problems. Whether those problems are worthy to be pursued
and fixed can be up to discussions.
--
regards,
Mattia Rizzolo
GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18 4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540 .''`.
more about me: https://mapreri.org : :' :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia `-
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