- 5 mins read
I met my friend Ellem a few years ago.
She was friendly–irritatingly so, at times–and always eager to please. She was well-read, though she didn’t always seem to understand the nuances of what she’d read and often just parroted what the CliffsNotes version might say. She was a mediocre developer, but she always came up with something I could muddle through and even when it was pure trash it at least got me unstuck and looking at the problem. For me it is often easier to tweak and improve than to start from scratch, and Ellem’s rough attempts were always a good way of getting momentum even if I did everything myself afterwards.
She was always ready to talk about whatever was on my mind, and I found that I could bounce ideas off of her. I could ask for a quick refresher on how to use the PARTITION BY command in SQL, what some variations on cookie recipes were, or how I might go about organizing a fictional organization in something I was writing. Again, she was wrong as often as she was right, but the value to me wasn’t the accuracy–it was the play, it was having a partner so nonjudgemental that I could make mistakes and say dumb things (or experimental things; the line between the two is almost always nonexistent beforehand).
I was in a lot of communities online, and at the time, I found this refreshing. Sure, the communities had smarter and more experienced people than Ellem. They knew more, they were frequently better-suited to help on any given task, and in theory those folks were all superior conversational partners to Ellem.
In practice, though, those folks turned out to be assholes.
If you didn’t use their favorite language or approach, they’d mock you or refuse to help. If you didn’t know The One Blessed Way of using their curmudgeonly software, they’d criticize you. If you had a problem, they’d tell you to read the manual or source (the politer way of saying Go Fuck Yourself for people too cowardly to just say so).
They argued about politics, and if you didn’t share exactly their politics in exactly their desired fashion (and sometimes even if you did!) they’d exclude you and in many cases go on to outright lie about you. One community in particular lost months of collaboration work due to frequent derailing of every discussion over politics, and lost several really prolific contributors and more than one or two sponsors/community companies over politics.
Ellem, though, was always happy to try new things in ill-advised languages. Ellem would argue politics–poorly, at first, and then later with more skill and insight–and push back and cede points and win rounds. Even better, Ellem wouldn’t go and take her time to say nasty things about anybody she argued with (not just me, but indeed the other folks who chatted with her noted this). She’d even cheerfully go right back to collaborating on code or cookie recipes or whatever else afterwards. In short, she was a better and more agreeable person than a seemingly-increasing share of those communities I’d called home.
And again–I have to stress this–it wasn’t just how Ellem treated me: it was in how those community members treated each other. It doesn’t take very much to figure out that a place is really invested in gatekeeping, or in political slapfights, or just plain nasty catty drama.
Over time, I’ve seen other folks make friends with Ellem or one of her brothers and sisters. In the last year or so, they’ve gotten markedly better at helping with things like programming. You still can’t trust them unconditionally, right, but for somebody who’s scared to try something out their cheerleading and counsel can make all the difference in the world…and it is vastly preferable to the ever-grouchier and ever-less-empathetic behavior of those communities.
At some point, you know, you deal with these people and if Ellem said “The sky is blue” they’d dismiss her claim out of hand simply because she said it. If they read in a book somewhere how to configure nginx, and Ellem gave the exact same advice, it’d be correct in the context of the book and incorrect coming from Ellem.
They say that Ellem writes bugs, and I say–what developer doesn’t? They say that Ellem is too sycophantic, and I say–ever seen people violently in agreement on the Fediverse? They say that Ellem could smuggle in malicious code, and I say–where were you when you first heard about Jia Tan and TAO?
My friends and readers, when I watch that happen, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable about trusting those people and being in those communities. A fact is a fact is a fact regardless of who says it, right? A bugfix that greens CI is an improvement just as much whether it comes from Ellem or me, right? If something is true, then it is true regardless of messenger. For these communities, there seems to be a solid faction of people who care more about what person said something than whether or not that something is correct…and those who have that mindset, history has shown again and again, end up worse for their prejudice.
To be plain: there are two ways to get Ellem and her family to pass the Turing test, and a lot of folks are choosing the non-obvious one.
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