It's unlikely that there will be any further releases of mt32-pi
github.comI did find the community around those projects (MisterFPGA) to be rather weird, so I understand a little where he's coming from.
In my experience, their description sounds exactly like the greater emulation and retrogaming scene in general.
I've found the MiSTer community to generally be pretty helpful, but there are definitely exceptions. The fact that its a project that aims to perfectly match the behavior of the original hardware leads to some strange arguments.
mt32-pi has been, and will continue to be, a source of great joy for many retro PC enthusiasts. For those of us with a particular interest in DOS music, it is huge.
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.
So sad when people feel pressured and harrased out of the fun in doing open designs. Looked like a really cool project .
What stands out is the abuse this person suffered. I know that's real and have seen it.
Do you have any indication of why this person was the target of abuse?
My speculation is that the demographics are mostly immature adolescents and young adults that never experienced the laborious effort of making something and thus have an entitled fickle mentality. I think gaming in general is like this.
I think you'd probably be surprised at how many 'cyberbullies' are 40+ who do it because it makes them feel young and powerful again.
Can’t speak to them specifically, but generally anyone of particular note or import is going to be targeted by those who feel sleighted. It’s why Celebrities get stalkers, why Influencers get “taken down” in hate videos, and why small project contributors eventually throw up their hands and say “fuck this” after having enough toxicity from the very groups they’re trying to serve or help.
Some people just cannot stand being a “lesser-than” in their own minds, and will rip apart others. It’s always been there, but the social media and data harvesting era of today has made it easier than ever to terrorize someone you just plain dislike.
I hate that they’ve been pushed to ending the project so abruptly, but I hope they find joy again soon.
I think this is very subculture dependent. Celebrity culture? Sure. Gamer culture? Absolutely. But I feel like there are many subcultures that are much less prone to harassment of prominent community members.
There is also I think a distinction between people whose toxic behavior comes from their miscalibrates sense of entitlement and people whose toxicity comes from their desire to bully someone.
Having done a lot of volunteer work, I know firsthand that many people simply don't realize how much effort goes into something that seems simple. They will make suggestions and sometimes demands, pressing the value and importance of what they're asking. But they don't step up to help. This doesn't rise to the level of bullying and harassment, but it can be extremely frustrating, draining, and discouraging.
Anyone who garners fame of any kind needs to have thick skin because he will inevitably get just as much hate as he does praise. It's probably something fundamental in human nature, or even life itself. I've seen this cycle play out time and time again everywhere across a countless variety of peoples and subject matters.
The first thing that comes to mind is this paper:
”Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models” (2018)
It’s a review article on the research topic Anger and Interpersonal Aggression.
It reviews a lot of interesting knowledge from neuroimmunobiology to the sociobehavioral implications.
What is wrong with people? Who is such a loser that they send abusive things like this to a maintainer's email address?
I'm just an observer, but from the outside, it seems like the emulation scene really, really likes to drive creators to drink or worse.
It takes a considerable amount of time, skill and engineering to create great emulators, and yet people still find reasons to complain or even harass developers of the projects they themselves are using.
It's just bizarre. I've seen some of it as a maintainer of some open source projects, but it's never escalated to harassment or what the OP describes. I really cannot relate to anyone that treats others like that.
My theory (as someone who's worked on a variety of open source projects, in various scenes) is that "moderately technical user" is the most problematic group to offer open source projects too. The heavily technical, software for software devs, side of things generally has you interfacing with people who have some experience with open source development, and the worst you'll run into are people who are aggressively trying to "help". On the opposite extreme, you've got stuff like VLC player, where a large chunk of the userbase aren't technically inclined enough to hunt down your feedback mechanisms.
The "power user" demographic simultaneously lacks the experience with OSS development to sympathize, and possesses the motivation/ability to hunt you down to reach out to you. Even worse if you end up stumbling into the realm of technically inclined children (Minecraft modding can only be done by completely blocking any form of player feedback).
A friend at a previous company revealed after years of working together that he was the primary developer on a popular console emulator. He uses an alias and keeps it all quite secret because the level of harassment that alias endures is horrible.
The idea of spending hours every day for years straight on something you have to keep secret from almost everyone just... really sucks.
It isn't unique to the emulator scene by any means, though I'm sure some domains are worse than others. (e.g. due to the amount of interest from unsupervised children, among other factors)
I think it's just simply that there is a tiny percentage of the population that is dysregulated (and a large portion that is dysregulated a tiny part of the time)-- once your project is seen by enough people eventually some of these people cast their interest your way.
The communications mediums we use and prevailing cultures (e.g. see "geek social fallacies") are highly vulnerable to abuse, and a few abusers with axes to grind can easily enlist additional abuse from large mobs particularly where communication is public and durable. As contributors patience wears thin they become more exposed, both due to reduced kindness trigging more abusers and their justified intolerance of abuse looking more unreasonable to outsiders.
For most open source development the incentives to contribute are pretty thin. People do it because they enjoy working with co-contributors, helping out the public, and getting some positive recognition. It doesn't take much to turn that net-negative.
There is some level of attack that probably improves friendships and social cohesion. When it's just one wingnut that shows up on your mailing list the community can nuke them from orbit and everyone (except the wingnut, I suppose) can feel good about it ("Can you believe that guy?" "I know, right?!"). But when the attacks are mild enough that it's not obvious if you should ban them, when they come in with a twitter army, when it just won't stop-- it can really sap the energy out of projects.
I think projects could improve by moving more of their regular workflow to invite-only mediums-- private repositories, issue trackers, etc. If someone wants to complain about your project then they can do it on their own forum, they don't get to use the projects tools as a platform to crap on the project and deprive the contributors of their freedom to ignore the noise.
But I'm not sure, the highly open culture today has advantages in gaining new contributors but even if you're willing to eschew those advantages the change in norms makes that less viable. In 1998 you totally expected to email some patches to the developers of a project then get invited onto their email threads or a private mailing list. Today because the norm is some open github repository it's not clear how many people would be willing to work the old way.
> I think projects could improve by moving more of their regular workflow to invite-only mediums-- private repositories, issue trackers, etc. If someone wants to complain about your project then they can do it on their own forum, they don't get to use the projects tools as a platform to crap on the project and deprive the contributors of their freedom to ignore the noise.
Yessss!!! Or, in other words: Stop to make everything social media, stop making 'like' buttons your god, and get real again.
That would be sooooo helpful. For many parts of life.
You won't loose so much imho. It's a lot overhyped. Sure you lose all the people who are basically there for the social media factor. Well... I see no problem with that. Their perceived worth is much much higher than their real one. Social media is all about a big show. Not about actually delivering actual value.
Btw, in some regards, the private mailing list is a lot more 'open' than proprietary cloud services instead (i.e. discord).
One thing to watch out for is generalized depression. It can make it seem that all projects are not worth investing in. It may seem to be related to this project but it may be a wider issue for the individual.
Sometimes responses like the OP's are the natural, healthy and expected reactions to reality.
It's insanely stressful and discouraging to be harassed, threatened, pseudo-stalked and have your work stolen for profit. Often the healthiest thing to do is to walk away from toxic situations and invest your time, attention and pursuits elsewhere.
That said, circumstances like these can certainly cause lasting depression. I just don't perceive the OP's behavior stemming from depression, it seems like a perfectly logical and healthy reaction in response to a shitty situation.
“ I have endured a sustained campaign of abuse from members of the VOGONS forum, been labelled a "clout-chaser", had threats sent to my personal email address, code been used in other projects without proper accreditation, my 3D print designs stolen and sold by faceless eBay/Etsy sellers, personal attacks made towards me when people don't get their feature request... the list goes on and on.”
I mean, perhaps they have depression, but this is pretty awful. It’d make me want to quit.
NO. I work on very public software, I receive pretty terrible criticism in reviews and email. Generally a vocal minority of people are unkind scammers and want it all for free and let me know. Blaming the recipient of the emails (victim blaming) or saying the individual may be suffering from wider issues is not on. It is irrelevant, it is their private life. At issue are the scum who scam.
I can not be sure of anything based on a blog post of a guy I've never heard of until yesterday. I just said "watch out" to try to raise awareness.
I personally have experienced a lot of bad stuff too. It is sort of par for the course if you make popular projects. I'm lucky that I'm not that affected by these side effects of high profile projects.
But I've known of two different individuals I've collaborated with (I've worked with a lot of people over the last 30 years) who have suffered from real periodic depression and it exhibits itself as emphasizing everything bad and minimizing anything good and basically saying nothing is worth it. In the moment for these individuals they truly believe this, but it is actually a real depressive episode that is colouring their judgement. I think the depressive episodes have triggers, but most of what gets described as the cause and the situational problem is just a symptom of the depressive episode. At least this person is acting, the more worrisome type of response I've seen is a lack of action/withdrawal as that doesn't really fix anything and then it isn't clear how long the episode will last.
I didn't read it as victim blaming to say the author might have general depression. Because the cause of the depression here are clearly the assholes who took the joy out of it.
A discussion of the victim is not relevant. A discussion of the root cause is.
Well, we don't know what else happened in his life (at least I don't) and we all seem to agree that assholes demanding things and even use threats are a problem and not an easy to solve one.
did you read the text linked?
I did. I am not going to harp on this because it is unfair to the individual who is the topic of this post.
That sounds pretty dark. What's this vogon forum? ironic name
I think it stands for "Very Old Games On New Systems"
The sad irony of members of a forum named as such harassing someone who is indeed building a very old MIDI synthesizer for new hardware.
It's vogons dot org; it's a pretty wide range of folks with varied interest in obsolete hardware. Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable.
There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.
I did a quick search for references to mt32-pi on that forum and found nothing unpleasant. Maybe I'm missing something.
https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...
Speculation: maybe abusive comments were later removed by mods?
Forum admin here. No posts were reported or removed and the author hasn’t posted since last April. I don’t know what’s going on here and have reached out to them to try to understand and assist. The community standards explicitly prohibit off-site harassment but unless someone tells us, there’s nothing I can do about it.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1256822&hilit=mt32%20...
looks spicy but almost a year old, maybe the guy continued to harass.
At least they are something that actually exists on their own, and not just a Microsoft cloud entity.
I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.
> Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable.
This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.
This is exactly what happens on VOGONS, but it relies on the community reporting violations, and I suspect this isn’t happening consistently. I’ve reviewed too many reports where multiple people had been breaking the rules for days before anyone bothered to flag a single post.
I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species.
Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.
The best idea imho is the assumption that people have some intelligence. I know, it's an utopia. But, well... Give them a way to block users. Help law enforcement when something actually criminal happens. For the rest, just let it happen, and let the people deal with it. As in real life. There is no other chance. Making the masses even more stupid than they are today (by hiding reality from them) is not the way to go. It never was. Let people interact with each other on their own. There cannot be a higher instance which 'manages' that in some way. Censorship isn't better when you call it 'moderation'. And don't declare everything as a harassment or worse. It's just a facet of communication to also communicate unfortunate things. People are veeeery sensitive plants since some time.
And again, for actual crime, it's not the forum moderators at all who should lead some actions. That would really be problematic.
> Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently.
Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.
Three-strikes-style rules like this make for easy decision-making, but they don’t make for good decision-making. They eliminate curiosity about the root problem, reject the reality of how humans learn (it is almost never linear), and usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point. Compliance by fear does not make for open and healthy communities.
The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.
> They eliminate curiosity about the root problem
Sure but they also give consistency, avoid the sheen of "you can behave badly if you do it infrequently", and avoid the kind of loophole lawyering you often get when rules aren't consistently and stringently applied.
> usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point.
Having been in many forums where bad behaviour[0] was not rooted out at source immediately and forcefully, I can say from my experience that also ends up badly. Perhaps not for the people in charge and their favoured brethren, I'll grant you.
[0] Including my own on occasion, I am ashamed to say with hindsight.
Why so much emphasis on rules? If someone is clearly doing something wrong, you don't need a rule violation. If someone is not clearly doing something wrong, then don't ban them. This way, there is no possibility for rules lawyering.
The goal of an online community is to be a space where people interact, so banning someone from interacting is a failure to succeed at the goal, but so is allowing someone to remain to the point where others choose to leave voluntarily.
The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.
You give them warnings, time-limited bans, etc. I wasn't trying to say it has to be binary, I was saying the rules are given too much emphasis by some people when they really don't matter at all.
E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.
> I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it.
You find a new moderator who won't stand for it. They start escalating moderation action, and the wider moderation team follows their example
If you're at the point where your community is so toxic that you can't find a moderator... you need a ban wave. Good luck
Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to other online spaces like Twitter and Reddit where the discourse today is so toxic that it has desensitised people into accepting or even encouraging abusive behaviour. Name-calling is a typical example. It’s something that should register as abusive but doesn’t for most people any more, because in these very high-profile online spaces it’s not just normative, it’s actively rewarded with likes and upvotes. It’s probably impossible to not have that seep into most people’s baseline expectations for online conduct.
An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.
... or you just finally realize that interaction beyond your own bubble is more complicated, harder, and more tiring, but not toxic. People are very very sensitive plants nowadays. It doesn't help. Don't try to hide people even more from reality. You did that for long enough, obviously. Don't make them even more stupid by declaring everything as toxic harassment which challenges their simple, tiktok-driven minds. We already have enough of those zombies around, who in a few decades are planned to acquire my pension.
I have to second the remarks about abuse from the Vogons community. There are members of that forum that are a blight on the retro computing landscape quite frankly. The abuse that I've seen them level at others for simply enjoying themselves is staggering.
When I debuted my own first major retro project, "Building the REAL Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I went to absolute lengths to prove my research was done with such absurd meticulousness simply out of fear that I'd be targeted by Vogons and bullied into oblivion for it. I spent two years and thousands of dollars buying old hardware just to ensure every little detail was as perfect as I could make it.
Other much larger youtubers such as PhilsComputerLab received so much abuse over the years they straight up left the site entirely.
Another friend of mine was also recently harassed by a user on that site, snarkily editing all his posts with ".Deleted because it was useful but ignored." after giving useless commentary [2]
Vogons is a blight. The files hosted on it should be moved to the Internet Archive and the website allowed to sink into linkrot oblivion. There's very little useful information on it to begin with, just a bunch of angry old men smugly jerking each other off about "period correct" 90's computer builds
I really want one of the hats for the Radpberry Pi but it doesn’t look easy to source. I don’t see any boards for sale and I’ve never tried to use PCBWay.
At least two of the hats https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi/wiki/I%C2%B2S-DACs look like they are currently for sale. And I didn’t check all of them.
Most of these appear to just be DACs. I want one with DIN in and out, a screen and some controls. The couple I can find seem to be gerbers and BOMs only.
The second one on the list, the Pisound, has two DIN ports (one in, one out) and looks like something that you can buy.
> Pisound is an ultra-low latency high-quality sound card and MIDI interface specially designed for Raspberry Pi pocket computers.
> Equipped with 192kHz 24-bit Stereo Input and Output driven by the legendary Burr-Brown chips, DIN-5 MIDI Input and Output ports, user-customizable button and bundled software tools, this little Raspberry Pi HAT will bring your audio projects to a whole new level!
And seems to be pretty much ready to go as soon as you get it:
> Setup is Eaaasy!
> Pisound mounts directly onto Raspberry Pi, no additional power adapter or soldering is required.
I know nothing about any of this, but it makes me angry – not sad – that yet another creator of something good and worthwhile, has been burnt by demands and infighting until they walk away in disgust. Good for you, dwinham.
Thanks for your effort.
wow, sad
The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment.
Return to Cathedral.
'DOS" retro pseudo-hackers [crackers] always have been a cancer like this, sadly. Elitism, tons of gatekeeping that would even blush most *BSD users, code stealing, non-acreditation... basically the opposite of the public FOSS/Nix/Lisp world.
They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems.
Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too.
In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX.
A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
> Return to Cathedral.
What does this mean?
It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.
Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged.
This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).
> ...where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.
The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.
A closed-off development team releases what they want, and you take it or leave it, like sqlite.
Or just put a fence around the bazaar.
Eh, it was never any different. Have you seen the mailing lists of the 90s? There were lots of very bitter, vitriolic, long-running feuds going on.
I was there, I'm personally convinced it's much worse now. Perhaps I'm suffering from rose colored glasses, wouldn't be the first time.
My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion.
Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
It's just because there are more people online compared to the 90s. If 1% of people are extremely excessively unpleasant, then with 100 people that's one person. With 1,000 people then that's 10 people, with 10,000 people that's 100 people, etc. There's maybe 10 million developers involved today? So that's 100,000 people.
It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
I agree that scale is the bigger factor, but the infrastructure matters too: Consider invite only vs writable-by-everyone default. Open source development moved from a lot more invite based in the mid 90s to a strong writable-by-everyone social media model particularly with the adoption of Github vs svn/cvs. But the scale issue is an argument that open source should have been going in the opposite direction. More unpleasant actors means more justification for reducing participation.
I suppose the thing that changed with GitHub is that 1) issue trackers became widely available, and 2) the concept of pull requests (and "drive-by" contributions). Before that, it was basically "email me" for most smaller projects (or maybe an email list on SourceForge).
I suppose "ignore some asshole in your email" is easier, and also hard to pile on comments in a private email box. But beyond that, I'd say having an issue tracker is a net positive, as is the ability to create PRs easily.
I wouldn't say that "social media-izing" is a good way to describe any of that, but I understand what you mean.
The main problem is probably more "brigading" from Twitter/X/Mastodon/Facebook/whatnot.
There were trackers before github for sure-- but like it's a pretty ordinary setup to make issues private to project members until triaged... that sort of thing pretty much kills brigading dead and it's a thing you can't do on github.
There is a continuum between totally private and what github provides, with self hosted tools you could hit a number of different spots on that spectrum. Cynically one reason for the lack of flexibility is that the maximally permissive side is probably better for the expansion of Github's business.
It's an intentionally edgy statement, got it...
The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed.
It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.
Completely understandable. Sucks to see this keep happening to OS devs