@tjg We can discuss anything here.

I'm interested in your views on patriarchy and alternative systems.

@meow: Sure! Need some time to think where to start, unless you have questions or want to go in some direction...

Though unmoderated spaces tend to have bad dynamics, so I may leave. 😛

I moderate this space.

Can we start from the beginning, if you don't mind, with the ideas you originally tried to introduce on the #C0CB40N8K channel?

Well, my first post (about "patriarchy")... I regretted as too vague, and likely I didn't give myself time to focus on what people were really talking about.

Feel free to begin however you like then.

Ok, I'll just take some time to compress my thoughts and return later.

I will be here when you return.

TBH, the way the discussion in #C0CB40N8K turned out makes me fear a bit. I notice two things

1. I am afraid to say what I think because I guess my tone is way to harsh without meaning it personal. But I get the feeling that people might take it personal and

2. This makes me think of an essay by Paul Graham: "What you can't say": http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html which basically says that a society is defined by what you are not allowed to say.

I always thought this was ridicioulus, but now, the first time in my life, I feel it for myself. I am afraid to say my opinion.

And this is what makes me fear about the direction in which our society heads.

@sveri: I agree. I am not an admin on Slack. I'm not sure who is ultimately leading the community and why certain things cannot be discussed. We are all adults. Discussing while disagreeing is what adults are expected to do.

I created this channel, put in a clear warning about the content, and will defend our right to discuss absolutely anything within the safety of this channel.

@meow: That sounds good. Although I want to say that I make a clear difference between a strong discussion and personal insults. A good discussion should be based on facts and opinions without insulting other people.

I just had a funny thought. This channel here reminds me of the smoker zones that we have at the stations here in germany. These are small spaces, bordered by yellow lines where people are allowed to smoke.

It feels like this is a channel to discuss freely without fearing to hurt somebody

By all means, feel free to smoke. I'm a smoker.

And the channel is a bordered zone with yellow lines 😄

With good music, leather sofas, a fully stocked bar, cigars, and a fireplace.

hehe, which ones do you play?

Well, since we are in this channel, I suppose we can talk about it. At the same time, this channel might get me kicked off of Slack.

Hmm, what to do, what to do.

The online roleplaying that I do is my own creation, not a traditional or other-defined game.

And it involves marginalized activities outside of the mainstream.

The subject of which involves human sexuality and interpersonal relationship dynamics.

I think that's clinical enough for a start.

You can ask me anything and I will answer honestly. You might not like or agree with my answers, and that's okay.

Yea, no problem. Actually I often thought about creating a kind of MMORPG with sexual content only for adults. I think this is a market where you might earn a lot of money and that is not saturated yet. Given the AI improvements we have there might be a lot of bots so that every member can get its sexual counterpart in some way. Or the other way around, for every pleasure there is a NPC waiting 😄

I am working on something along those lines. But a bot would never work for me. I roleplay with real people.

There are roleplaying groups on Fetlife and Kik that are fairly popular.

I also just roleplay on Kik with people I meet on Fetlife.

Ah, never heard of these communities

I have Andy OS installed on a Windows 10 laptop so I have an Android environment in which to run Kik.

are you creating something new? Or a plugin for an existing community?

It works really well since I have a real keyboard.

I'm working with the Braid Chat team. #C0J20813K

I'm speaking at Clojure/west about Braid.

Braid will become a virtual reality and gaming platform over time.

Interesting, I missed that where you decided to do so

Nice idea

Not sure I understand what you just said.

Sorry 😄 I how we started out thinking about moving the community to braid chat, but then got lost on the track

and missed when you decided to push braid into a virtual reality and gaming platform

Yes, and I have plans beyond that as well, but must take things one step at a time.

Slighly off-topic, I do find it interesting that gay people can come out of the closet and get support from the community,

But as a polyamorous sadomasochist I am still shunned and reviled by the majority of society,

I think it's a matter of convenience. The society gets accustomed that there are gay people, because they exist for a long time and speak out for some time too. Polyamorysm (or whatever the english ism word for that is :D), is just not that long in the media. 10 or 20 years in it, it might be more accepted I guess.

Polyamory has been around for a long time, but, yes, society is set in its ways.

True

I was married and monogomous and never cheated for 24 years, ending in divorce. I tried monogomy and will never do it again.

And then we can talk about how programmers invest too much of their ego in their code.

If you criticize their code, saying something like "that function really sucks" they take it personally.

Why beat around the bush. Nobody is ever more critical of my code than I am. So I welcome someone with the courage to just tell me when it sucks.

Its just code. It can be changed. No big deal.

Well, there is a twist in critics. Being constructive usually means you cannot go out and tell someone that something they created sucks. I see that from a different perspective. If I see bad code what do I want? 1. I want it to be changed to good / better code 2. I want the person that wrote the code to learn about it, understand it's failures and so on. These are my goals. To achieve it, it does not work to say "that function sucks". There are a few people that can handle being direct, but most cannot, that's just the reality I have to accept.

I agree that my stance was extreme. I think what's important is that we get to know each other as people.

That way we know how to best communicate with the person about their code.

Too much fake politeness can be just as counter-productive.

Yea, that makes sense. Fake politeness usually is as bad as shouting out without being constructive

I think there was a culture of common sense that somehow got lost along the way over the last years.

Right, but the "rules" push us to that lowest common denominator of always being "polite".

Yes, common sense is particularly uncommon these days. Sadly so.

We are trying to deal with all these issues constructively in the development of Braid.

How?

Here is a document I sent the dev team yesterday that you might find interesting.

http://www1.wfh.org/publication/files/pdf-1245.pdf

I also posted it in #C0CB40N8K but I doubt many will read it.

This looks interesting, although, I find it strange to find the Federation of Hemophilia publish about such a topic. Thanks, I will save that for later

I did a search on the subject and that was the best concise document I could find.

Also note that the two authors are female.

There have been complaints made to the admins about my attempts to engage the female community in #C0CB40N8K .

Apparently they are tired of having to explain things to men and want to be left out of it all.

How did you try to engage the female community?

I went to #C050YB2HH once or twice and asked them to participate.

I went to a lot of groups in an attempt to make sure the entirety of the community was represented and knew they were welcome to participate.

I am subscribed to every channel here.

You can't be proactive without risking offending somebody.

I knew the risks.

¯\(ツ)/¯

You relate to this question: "would love to have input on discussions taking place on #C0CB40N8K regarding gender bias in open source"?

That was me.

Yea, I know, but is that what you got complained about?

Someone had posted a document on that subject.

So I thought it might be a good way to get feedback.

I have no idea what triggered the complaints or who made them.

I was just politely warned by the admins to stop doing it.

I don't get it. Also, I totally dislike snitching. I just have a hard time teaching my kid to stop snitching, stand for himself and resolve things for himself. I never understood why people go out and complain about somebody else. This is totally off of my mind, except in very harsh cases of course.

In school I got picked several times and when I complained about it, teachers usually just told me to resolve it myself. When, at fist it was hard for me to accept that, I learned a lot in that time and it helped throughout my whole life.

Yep. Nobody has complained to me personally. But I have total respect for the admins so I don't hold it against them. They have a tough job.

That's what I liked about the usenet and mailing list a lot and I think this is something missing here. A killfile or the option to ignore people. It would make it easy for the others. These who feel offended can just ignore all these offenders and nobody would have to deal with it.

Of course I would prefer talking to each other, but ignoring at least does not make more work for the admins.

Exactly. Slack is slick but misses the mark in some fundamental ways.

Braid is wrestling with these issues in order to get them right.

I think every reasonable community tool needs that and most have it.

Yes. At the same time, it is still up to the community to use the tool most effectively, however insufficient the tool might be.

True, you can only use what you have and if you miss something, try to come up with common sense

Yeah. I mean, lots of big groups get by with just an email list.

They've just adopted conventions to make that effective for themselves.

So its always going to be a combination of the tool and the human.

Always.

We need a culture, not just a better tool.

Yep, a forgiving and listening culture.

Or many subcultures that get along at their intersections.

I understand that not everyone wants to hear about sex in a tech group. But I'm working on chat systems to support online BDSM roleplaying. Why can't I talk about that?

Should we come up with a list of all taboo subjects?

I hate politics, government, money, capitalism, and almost all business endeavors.

Should those all be taboo subjects then?

Yes, totally 😄

Of course not.

rofl

Yes!

Everything everyone hates should be a taboo

Right

This makes it easy to talk about things

So we have nothing left to talk about.

Yea, sounds good 😄

Do you want to fork that off of braid chat?

All rainbows should be gray.

No, it won't be a fork. Braid will support many types of communication.

Hm...sounds itneresting...I like the idea

You want to monetize on that?

It will just be a server instance configured to support the type of communication I need.

I may monetize it perhaps. It's open source so anyone can do the same.

Yea, but once you have a community it will hard to track these people to somehwere else

True for that aspect, I agree.

The customers provide value, software is just a tool. I'll be back in ca. 30 minutes, will talk then, if you want

But there are many ways one could monetize such a tool.

cool, sure

Just poke me.

@meow: Well, things lasted longer than thought, I am off now, going to bed. Let me know how things go with braid chat

Ok.

And thanks for the nice talk, I enjoyed it

After today's conversation, here's my perspective... Women constantly get death threats (their families too) for saying what they think. Take Kathy Sierra: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindness-weev-and-the-cult-of-the-angry-young-man (Maybe that's a big reason why women avoid opensource. Who wants to work for zero pay under such awful conditions?) And it's not just blatant violence. Trolls can also destroy forums. Paul Graham wrote: > trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit. http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html