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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26708 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Hi 👋🏾 I used to participate in /r/TheMotte. Are self-CW posts allowed?

subject: wokeism in tech, another wrongthink-ban incident

tl;dr - I recently got banned from the NixOS core community (including GitHub) as a result of a rather biased application of their Code of Conduct.

Here's the full text of my post including the timeline of events and analysis: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

The steak is completely immaterial. They wanted a pretext and anything would do. If you'd set no header image and left it as a white background, they'd still find a way to get mad about it. Picking the fight alone is asking to be squashed - a better play would be to build useful parallel infrastructure and a network of supporters, then defend it from being taken over in a plausibly-deniable way (like how some establishments have dress codes because that's a legal proxy for excluding the riff-raff they want to keep out).

Picking the fight alone is asking to be squashed

No disagreement here.

a better play would be to build useful parallel infrastructure and a network of supporters, then defend it from being taken over in a plausibly-deniable way

Interesting. Can you elaborate on this? Has there been a track record of tech communities doing this? I know that DHH had to basically rebuild the Ruby community but he only did it after the Basecamp drama.

I don't have any good examples. Graham and Determinate Systems seem to be trying to do this with their custom Nix installer, FlakeHub, etc. If they succeed in making a better user experience, then the default Nix experience becomes de facto controlled by a corporate entity instead of the Nix project and Foundation.

Declaring an explicitly antiwoke project will not work: it provokes a reaction and gets taken down before it becomes entrenched, and attracts witches more than contributors. Someone wanting to do something like this would hide his power level, build things that people depended upon, and make damn sure those projects don't get subverted, and work towards positions of community power and influence. I don't know how you defend against hostile forks.

I don't know how you defend against hostile forks

The honest way is to make sure yours is better. A more effective way might be to take advantage of the reason for the hostility and spin up some sock puppets to cause drama in the forked community.

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