By moving much of our flame-inducing conversation to planet, an inherently controlled environment, we’ve mostly killed the most serious GNOME trolls. Hence, we don’t get nearly as many quality moments like this anymore. That post was apparently the web’s first instance of the key phrase, but it was only one of many responses to the classic GNOME troll, oGALAXYo, who would later go on to such successes as goneME. oGo was the classically troubling troll, in that he did actually occasionally contribute something useful, and you wanted to encourage that, but most of the time he was just gigantically irritating, and you wanted to strangle him. The post above suggests which way we leaned. Not coincidentally, oGo also stimulated John Fleck to do some useful pondering on whether or not Free Software selects for people who are nice.
4 thoughts on “More great moments in trolling”
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Hey Luis. My opinion is that criticism, for a wise receiver, is probably the most enlightening form of communication. It of course also depends a little bit on the person who does the criticism (it shouldn’
[…] Luis writes about the effect that planet gnome has had on the character of project-scope conversations in Gnome. He left a bit of meat on that bone though: why is it that (mostly) the same people are having a different conversation? Is it just the lack of a few individuals with a high mail-to-code ratio? […]
[…] Luis reminded me the other day of one of the few smart insights I’ve ever had: the notion that in the free software world, a free-for-all of self-organizing social systems, “evolution” of a sort selects for nice people. […]
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