> Please assume other participants are posting in good faith, even if you disagree with what they say. When people present code or text as their own work, please accept it as their work. Please do not criticize people for wrongs that you only speculate they may have done; stick to what they actually say and actually do.
That's a breath of fresh air. There's always someone who tries to read between the lines and strawman people for what they did not say/express. Keeping the benefit of the doubt is always a more charitable (and peaceful) way for conversations to take place.
> There's always someone who tries to read between the lines and strawman people for what they did not say/express.
The claim that there is always someone creating strawmen is itself the creation of a strawman. If you assume good faith of participants then it might be useful to assume good faith of those who criticise even if they misunderstand or misread or assume unwarranted implications.
I think this would be covered under assuming people are acting in good faith but I absolutely agree this is something that should be stated explicitly.
Don't treat someone who says they felt hurt or excluded as someone overly sensitive. Because even when someone gets the wrong impression you may find it valuable to reflect on why that impression was received in the first place.
And please don't treat people who try to point out exclusionary or hurtful language like they're your adversary or trying to control you -- it can be incredibly hard for people of disprivileged demographics to speak up for themselves. I have to rely on the defense of others constantly because when I speak for myself I'm not taken seriously.
Well, in the case of volunteer software projects, I think people who make significant contributions should be cut a great deal of slack, whereas those who criticize contributors without contributing themselves aren't entitled to any slack at all.
I think there's a huge difference between cutting slack and assuming positive intent, in the same way that there's a huge difference between criticism and constructive feedback.
Cutting slack is essentially turning the other cheek to otherwise unwelcome behaviour, for whatever reason that might be.
I don't believe it's healthy at all to cut slack for some people and not others. On the contrary, it's incredibly healthy to give everyone the exact same assumption of positive intent up until it's proven otherwise.
Those making significant contributions should be doing their best to set the example, to show what the high standard is, and if you let them off the hook you're not holding them to account. You're putting them above the guidelines and essentially enabling them.
This doesn't mean that everyone should be criticised equally, but nobody should be above receiving constructive feedback on their communication just because they've contributed a lot of work.
And on that level, it also stands to reason that feedback has to be delivered compassionately and appropriately, and it works a lot better if that's done in the context of a trusting relationship or through people who are skilled in engaging in such conversations.
A newcomer to the community who criticises everybody else is not communicating kindly or compassionately. The assumption of positive intent may suggest that they're not familiar with the guidelines, so the constructive feedback would be to present those guidelines and point out where the newcomer may have fallen short.
I mean that's pretty much how it works in practice, I don't think there's really a need to codify "you can get away with being insufferable so long as you're valuable enough." It's not exactly a goal to strive for and more something that is tolerated until another options presents.
"There's always one" is a common rhetorical device whose meaning is closer to "There's often one, and I easily forget the times there's not." I don't think the parent's intention was to make such a claim.
Whether GP meant to make a strawman or not, i found the comment to be a good reminder to apply the strategy GP espoused. Hopefully that’s how it’s perceived- and not as an indictment of hypocrisy.
This is similar to what I consider to be one of the most important parts of the HN Guidelines:
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think it nicely and concisely encapsulates a few critical parts of online conversation: that it's a two-way street and to be productive requires responders to also really think about what is being said, and that we should all take a certain level of humility as a baseline because we lack a lot of the non-verbal cues that face to face discussion has. A big one (and a definitional part of the whole "global community" thing) is that it can be hard to tell on the Internet if someone is a native speaker or not. Particularly for English, since that gets a significant level of formal education through much of the world and is also a significant focus of machine translation with probably one of the larger learning sets due to being an early target. IRL people can quickly tell if there is some sort of language barrier and adjust accordingly, but in online discussions it can be a lot harder to not project too many expectations onto people on the other side of the screen. And of course even native speakers can just plain be tired, or have had a bad day, things which again non-verbal cues could suggest but takes conscious effort with just words. Finally, people outside of a specialization can have valuable ideas to convey but lack the terminology to express it the way someone specialized would. One could say they're not "native speakers" of that sub-dialect of English even if they're native English speakers.
So it really helps as a baseline to try to figure out what people are really aiming for even if they lack the precise words to convey it. I've found it's a suggestion that has made me contemplate and rewrite responses even if I still forget sometimes.
One fair corollary however: this is all as long as there is reason to assume good faith. That's the default assumption, but it's not a right either, it is in fact possible for someone to demonstrate bad faith. In that case suppression or expulsion should be swift despite any cries of "censorship", because resource exhaustion attacks are also a major threat in online discussion. Less so in more specialized areas like mailing lists then general forums, but even there it can happen via rules lawyering and the like.
That's a breath of fresh air. There's always someone who tries to read between the lines and strawman people for what they did not say/express. Keeping the benefit of the doubt is always a more charitable (and peaceful) way for conversations to take place.