There's no such thing as “The Perl Community”
neilb.orgNowadays I try, as much as I can, to not be bound to any single "community". With the world being polarized as it is, the communities, no matter what they are centered around, are becoming very tribal in nature, sometimes wading straight into cultishness. I don't like many phenomena which plague many communities, and try to avoid them as best I can.
Communities can be full of hypocrites who can't stop talking how diverse and inclusive they are and how everyone should feel welcome and safe, and at the same time either engage or be consciously oblivious to backstabbing inside — as long as the appearances are kept.
Communities can be poisoned by newcomers who would like to reform them from the ground up not a week after joining.
Communities can contain influential members with whom you are assumed to be always agreeing, and you can be expelled for not being thrilled with their ideas. And you are expected to be aware of everything dear leaders write or shoot videos about.
The outsiders may like to cherry-pick some behavior they label "problematic" from more prominent community members and label everyone as the carrier of such behavior.
Some communities would like to drag you in and have you commit to them if you only want to contribute a little something.
I have a gas stove at home. I'm by no means a member of some kind of gas stove users community (does it even exist?). I don't share tips on using your gas stove better, and I don't spend time bickering about advantages of gas stoves over electric ones.
I sometimes do drive-by pull requests to some projects which I use myself and which proved to be useful enough. Doesn't mean I "belong" or am "bound" to those projects in any shape or form.
100%. I use some online communities to learn about my hobbies - such as woodworking. The woodworking subreddit used to be my go-to place to learn about the skill from others.
That being said, they have very firm views about a certain brand of table saw, and will be slightly (and politely) combative if you justify using something else.
All groups have this issue - it's very, very, very easy to become an unhealthy echo chamber when it's all online. I believe it's because people automatically project their own emotions, beliefs, and standards onto comments from other humans. In other words, my theory is that online nonsense is so easy to fall into because everyone seems to think, contrary to reality, that they're the only person online.
Also, gas stoves absolutely are better than electric ones.
Induction stoves are fine! They're safe, efficient, cheaper to operate (in europe at least) and allow for precise control of their output!
Some time ago I tried to ask for advice related to my LCD TV. Then I found the "home theatre community" absolutely loathes my model. It's a fine TV that I got at a good discount, but apparently the only advice I'm allowed to get is "nobody should buy that model, so buy a new one".
As to TVs I get it - for some people it's a major purchase and they want to feel they made the right choice (I did this with a Plasma years ago) - and they feel they have to "defend" that choice - especially if they "came" to it after another model.
But there's another valid choice - this TV does what I want and is cheap enough that I'm not going to bother investigating further, and if I have to replace it in X years I won't mind much.
I can understand the sentiment here, but I don't think it's worth throwing community participation out entirely. I think the better way is to hedge your bets by being in several communities around a general idea. So niche subreddits are great for info, but generalist communities that are vaguely centred around a certain topic will last you longer. E.g. Facepunch, your local tech slack, etc.
You are definitely correct on not being bound to any one place. Anecdotally, I see some opinions on some slacks that I don't agree with but since I'm not bound to the place I don't mind too much. You can always bounce to one of the other groups for a time.
I get "bound" by downvote to each useless post in this community
> When we join a community that feels like a good fit, it's easy to assume that we all share the same values, but that's almost never the case. It's also tempting to think that because you're "with your tribe", that you should like everyone, and everyone should like you. But for a community of any size, that just won't be true, and hoping for it can only lead to disappointment.
Yes; see Five Geek Social Fallacies: https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
Projects have functioned just fine without elaborate governance structures. If a project is mature and the work is done, suddenly "improvers" appear, misquote Popper and write long texts about the elusive "community".
It starts innocent, but always ends badly like in the famous Orwell novel. Productive people move on to the next project or only produce proprietary software.
A repeated mistake I've seen related to that is the belief that communities create its members, despite the fact that members create communities. A lot of people think you can walk up to a community and use it like a tool to move people's opinions, beliefs, or values around, instead of the community being a reflection of shared opinions/beliefs/values.
Communities are overrated. They can be toxic, suffer from groupthink, operate in secret, and have high barriers to entry. But I agree with the poster that a "map of communities" that can organize and direct knowledge-sharing and communication is really useful.
I'm not the author, and I've never used Perl, but I've wanted to write pretty much this article (on the open source projects I'm involved in) for a long time now.
I believe the people talking about and pushing "community" have good intentions, but there are hidden negative consequences that are almost never acknowledged.
For example, it can ironically make a big project feel less welcoming, because newcomers may be pressured to feel they have to become part of the community even though that's basically impossible - because, as this article rightly points out, there is not the community but instead a federation of many communities.
It's not clear to me what problem this post is intended to address
That there isn't a single Perl community but rather communities that lack a shared behavior standard and that each has its own culture.
> I don't think we should talk about "The Perl Community", but rather "The Perl Communities".
That's like saying that "cities" don't exist, only "neighborhoods".
I take it like this:
There's no New York City community. There's no Bronx community. Both of those political units are way too big for communities to exist at that scale. It isn't diversity, although both of them are diverse, it's Dunbar's Number and the limits of the human animal. They exist in other ways, but they don't exist as communities.
Eh? No it isn't? It's like saying 'I don't think we should take about "the US city", but rather "the US cities"'.
No, he tried to explain why only the irc and p5p perl community is toxic and disfunctional. The others are fine. There are many good perl communities.