Why so rude?
Tags: opensource, community
Published: 2024-03-21 05:00:00

Having worked in the open for over 20 years I've conversed with people from all over the world and all different walks of life.

Recently I've noticed something troubling. Now this probably won't come as a surprise to many, but lately I've been running into people that just can't seem to understand that the experiences of others can be different than their own.

I know respect for multiple perspectives is hard, but the issues seem to have even grown to include simple mundane things about life where people can't look outside of their immediate surroundings.

The other night while watching a [Twitch.tv](https://twitch.tv) stream, we (chat) got into a discussion about starting vegetable seedlings before planting them in a garden. One chatter said something along the lines of

> lol you should have started that months ago.

I responded with

> We're clearly in different [hardiness zones](https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/) as I'm still about 8 weeks out from the last freeze. Hell it even snowed yesterday...

The chatter then responded with something like

> Oh yeah, I'm in Florida, we don't get frost.

Based on their initial response I knew that something like this response was coming because this has become a typical interaction for me.

I know I'm probably over analyzing this as I'm writing a blog post about it, but the original response comes off as disrespectful, elitist, and completely lacking in humility. 

I have interactions like this all the time and I honestly don't understand why. Someone will just blurt out something that's obviously subjective, with a high level of confidence, and in some cases will even try to mock the person they're responding to.

I don't know if it's some statistical anomaly or what, but people do this to me constantly. In the official Pidgin channels, my own Twitch streams, random chats, forums, wherever. People refuse to acknowledge my reasoning, see it as an attack against them, and then start rambling nonsense at me. It's gotten totally out of control.

Unfortunately When I've tried to confront this behavior, no matter how gentle I try to be, it's almost always seen as an attack against the other person. This is very ironic as typically they're the ones being rude and obtuse in the first place. 

A common example of this is that someone will mention that "Pidgin isn't a good IRC client". That is their opinion and I have no issue with that, but as the project maintainer, I would **REALLY** like to know what we can do better. 

Unfortunately these discussions tend to devolve extremely quickly. People feel like I'm putting them on the spot and become defensive no matter how sensitive I try to be.

I've seriously had people and observers think I was interrogating someone when I was using phrases like "I'd to hear your thoughts" or "could you be more specific?". 

I've spent a lot of time reflecting on these discussions and the only thing I've been able to come up with is that it appears that people just like to be rude. So much so, that they'll only remember that they didn't like something, and completely forget what they didn't like about it. 

Another example was in the exact same Twitch stream mentioned above. I mentioned that I was setting up a new build agent for Pidgin based on a [Raspberry Pi](https://www.raspberrypi.com/) 5 using an m.2 SATA drive.

Apparently that wasn't enough of a reason for people as the discussion immediately devolved into the typical "you can get a more powerful x86 machine for just as much" and so on.

Whether or not that is true depends on your own personal situation. However, the point I'm trying to make is that my personal reasoning for my choices were completely ignored while the discussion pivoted into a meta discussion driven by elitism.

On the plus side, I wasn't directly involved in the discussion anymore, but I still accidentally kicked it off, because surprise, people seem to have some very strong feelings about Raspberry Pis and feel the need to tell you all about them whether you want to hear them or not.

The reasons someone may be using a Raspberry PI is quite frankly, none of your business, and their mention of it is not an invitation for someone to start preaching to them. Perhaps the Raspberry PI was was a gift or a hand me down from a mentor to a new enthusiast who couldn't afford one. In that case, and many others, the price difference is completely irrelevant and you're just making yourself look bad by being rude and pedantic.

As I mentioned earlier, this scenario happens to me all the time. This is precisely why I refuse to discuss why we don't use [Git](https://git-scm.com/) or [GitHub](https://github.com) for [Pidgin](https://pidgin.im).

No matter what reasoning or data I provide, it won't be enough for defenders of the [monoculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture_(computer_science)). This group tends to think that there is one correct way to do things and everything else is empirically wrong and deserves immediate debate.

There's a similar group that will try to bait you into these debates with prompts like "I'm curious why you use <X>". For some reason they believe they deserve an explanation and will get indignant if you don't give it to them immediately.

Both of these groups are more interested in proving that their narrow focus is correct. They will ignore anything to the contrary and expect you to stop what you're doing and defend your stance immediately and attempt to sway their opinion, which can not be done. Many of them will also try to continue the discussion when you try to walk away. They're not interested in understanding, just their correctness and their ability to assert it.

As you might imagine, this is not only extremely exhausting and unproductive, it's also extremely hostile. No one wants to have to defend their choices constantly. Many people will write a blog post explaining their stance and point people to it like I'm doing now, but that has its own set of problems.

Many people have asked me to write a blog post on my preference of [Mercurial](https://mercurial-scm.org/) over Git and so far I've refused and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

I already know what the comments section will be like. I see it in trivial discussions like those mentioned above and I've seen it in this specific case too many times to count. I already know what the [Hacker News](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mercurial) and [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/search?q=mercurial&what=comments&order=newest) comment sections will look like because this topic has been rehashed so many times.

Nothing productive ever comes out of it and no one's "curiosity" is ever satisfied. Maybe a few people learn about some alternatives, but the only thing stopping them from even looking for them in the first place is the status quo of the monoculture.

More importantly, there is nothing for me personally to gain here. My choices are made from my own opinions which are based on my own experiences. Even if someone were to gain some insight from my description, they can't necessarily act on it due to the incompatibility of Git and Mercurial and the monoculture around Git will continue to enforce that until a new contender appears. 

If you've ever had a discussion with me that sounds like what I've described here, there's a good chance I ended up avoiding responding to you, timed you out, or banned you. Hopefully this post helps to explain why that happens.

Likewise, if you've ever seen me quietly disappear from a community it's most likely because I reached my limit of dealing with interactions like this.

I try to do my best to be understanding of cultural differences and translation issues that occur when interacting with individuals where English is a second language, but eventually my patience will run out and the only thing left that I can do is to leave.