Rockbox forums (and some developers): has it become a 'nerd supremacy'?

[zenji]

I heard Jaron Lanier today on the radio program The Philosopher's Zone.

I have to say my experiences with this forum were echoed by him perfectly.

He talks about the idea of  'a nerd supremacy' - how people who have knowledge (about in particular, technology) that puts them in a privileged position, can become arrogant, superior, aloof and stop listening.

I hesitated to put my last post on this forum because I expected the same as I got last time: exactly what I just described.

I think Lanier describes this phenomenon well in this fascinating interview (in the first minute):
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/

I also feel the same as this guy, in an Amazon review of Lanier's latest book:

"As I flipped through the book, the point that resonated most loudly to me was the impact `anonymity' has had on our virtual world (and maybe the real world as well). I can remember visiting a chat room that was dedicated to "Books and Literature" in 2000 or 2001. As a librarian I was naturally drawn to a space that I thought would be filled with others like me who had a love of the written word and for good books. Did that assumption back fire? You bet! What I found was a chat area filled with virtual people who wanted to chat about anything but books and literature. If I were to post a question about what people were reading or what they thought of a given book I was torn (virtually) from limb to limb. Having served in the military I have a pretty good operational understanding of foul language, and I'm pretty good at throwing the words around when necessary. However, that this language would be used in that particular venue by people who could remain anonymous was a shock. I'm pretty certain that most of the visitors to that website hadn't read a book in years and had no problem violating the most basic rules of civility."

SOURCE: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307269647?ie=UTF8&tag=randohouseinc-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307269647

When I posted my last suggestion, I already knew I'd  probably just be attacked. I almost felt fear as I TRIED one last time to communicate humanly with (some of) you. Anyone who dares to suggest something is attacked. And the attacks, like the one in response to my post about firmware, even eventually take on the 'flavour' of accusations of disloyalty - like a classic 'regime'.

You can claim all you like guys (some of you) that you are just talking about 'posting procedure' and the rest of it. LOOK HONESTLY! Alot of what you are doing is based on pure EGO - the psychology and emotion of arrogance, superiority and territory. It's sad, actually. Such a great little piece of tech you've created, but the human side of it has clearly become SFU !

I think some people in this group should take a strong look at themselves: their attitudes and their humanity.

I suggest also that someone have a look at the statistics of participation in these forums and even in rockbox development in general: I'd be willing to wager money that enthusiasm is strong intially but then quickly trails off, with many people never coming back.

[I wouldn't be surprised if slowly over time Rockbox stops getting downloaded...Not listening to USERS -> good suggestions aren' t included + disliked features are kept > it starts getting lukewarm reviews and then bad reviews ("not worth the trouble...developers are unresponsive..."") -> people can't be bothered.

Sure! People shouldn't 'complain' - because it's FREE! (That age-old reasoning heard MOST despicably from bad charities, but also in groups like this too.) But you've also WASTED all that work, too.

***

Well, hope you're all (some of you) are having FUN in your bedrooms...!

Time will tell.

____________________________
PS If you read my previous posts you will see I have no particularly deep commitment or emotional ties with this group that would make me say all the above out of some personal agenda of trying to prove something. I'm just someone who wandered into this 'place' and therefore sees it with the fresh eyes of the outsider. And it is 'NASTY' ! Psychologically SFU !

What a waste!

[saratoga]

I'm not reading that, but I'm guessing you're annoyed that no one wanted to implement those features you kept requesting.  I'm sorry you're annoyed, but complaining about the project isn't really going to motivate people to do thing for you. 

[AlexP]

Put simply - features only get in if developers want them, not users (or at least if developers are ambivalent and someone does the work).  Features rarely if ever get removed, but they certainly won't be if any developers use them.

Rockbox is primarily written by the developers for the developers.  Of course we are happy if other people use and like Rockbox, and are willing to listen to ideas, but pleasing everyone is not the primary concern, and a feature will not be added just because someone wants it.

We do have fairly high standards in terms of expecting people to do things like search and read the manual (and god forbid think) before posting, and yes, sometimes that can come across as (or just be) being unfriendly, and I'm sorry about that.  However we need some sort of policing to stop the forums reducing into some pointless free-for-all.

Also, if you want to get your point across, making baseless and tired insults:

Well, hope you're all (some of you) are having FUN in your bedrooms...!

just reduces you to the level that you claim we are at, and makes it much more likely that people will just ignore you.

[[Saint]]

Zenji,


What are the 100s of people you've just insulted, deliberately, supposed to think of you now?
You can think what you want about the intentions you believe our forum members to have, but I believe you've showed a lot about your own character just now...and it's not pleasant reading.


[St.]

[JdGordon]

1) None of the developers are anonymous. We have a full name policy which is strickly enforced, and just about everyone is on the rockbox map.
2) you're absolutly wrong on all counts, and heck, we dont cry over people not coming back. The core group of devs and experts/users  make this project what it is, not annoying users who come with a chip on their shoulder and think they shold tell us how things work in the real world. So, anyone that comes with lots of enthusiam and dissapears quickly really didnt have it, or was blatantly trolling.
3) I tihnk we all expect the download count to drop, we arent having as much luck with new ports as we were 18 months ago. But noone codeing rockbox cares about that.

And on a personal note, I have no problem being called a nerd supremist, thats language from someone who usually expects his own way and doesnt know how to handle being proven wrong.

[zenji]

I just think:
* it is an awesome piece of software
* that you've all put many hundreds of hours of work into

and therefore

* while it's totally fine to only do it for yourselves,
* it would be great to share it in an open and friendly way with the rest of the world, who really do appreciate it

and given this:
* i really, genuinely in all sincerity feel that the tone could be alot less snooty and some of the rules could be imposed (esp on newbies) with a bit more gentleness

____

I have NOT spent an hour of my life posting this based on some personal annoyance about some feature I want. I actually have forgotten what my first request for. And my hope to have the choice of which OS my player boots into has disappeared. I've reluctantly uninstalled Rockbox because - and this is NOT meant to cause offence - I am happy with Sansa's firmware in everything except the speed~tone options.

It was done as an exercise to try to reflect something back to a group who is doing something good but whose potential is, I feel, dampened in a major way by the TONE, and perhaps the attitudes of some.

With this, I say adieu and good luck to you all.
............

PS It wasn't aimed at 'hundreds' of people - but certainly most of the people I encountered weren't very pleasant.

[torne]

There's two problems here:

The first is that you phrased this in a way which made it extremely hard to read it as constructive criticism - it reads like an attack and was probably received as one by most people. Even if you allow a very generous interpretation, your original post still makes a lot of implied reference to basically "being a good product" and "having a large userbase" and virtually everyone here simply doesn't care about those things - they care about it being good in other ways, but "as a product" doesn't enter into it. People are not going to start caring about those things either; the project is what it is. So, if you want to change the attitudes expressed (and nobody here is claiming that everyone associated with the project has a great attitude all the time) you would need to be very careful about exactly what you suggest and the words you use to explain it, and your post here simply failed at that.

The second problem is that any individual developer (or other contributor to these forums) who feels like it's worth their time to have a "different" attitude, whatever that may be, is already doing that, and the ones who *don't* feel that way are not going to change because some random person on the forum posted a big rant about it. The first group are most likely to be offended by the things you said, and the second group are most likely to ignore them. We already *do* have reasonably well understood community standards, though they are not spelled out (it comes down to common sense) and we do correct each other when we feel things are out of line, though you probably won't *see* this as it's likely to be done in private. You *did* aim this at hundreds of people, whether you wanted to or not; by talking about us as a group that's the result.

Ultimately, this is all volunteer work, and Rockbox itself (as well as the manual) is a pretty *high quality* piece of volunteer work which would cost a vast amount of money to produce commercially. This kind of output requires a large time investment from people with a high level of technical skill - we have lots of small contributors but without a core of skilled people willing to devote a lot of time the system as a whole just would not hang together. This kind of person is motivated usually by technical challenge, not by popularity or acclaim, and while it's true that most people developing for Rockbox started doing so to benefit themselves, it's also true that the "core" developers put in *far* more time and effort than would be required to serve only their own needs, not just into development but also into technical support, both at the level you see here on the forums for users, and also on IRC for users, people who want to get into developing for Rockbox, and the other existing developers (nobody knows everything after all).

Asking those people to give you *even more* of their time, which for many of them is *very valuable* time - most of us have day jobs and few of them are poorly paid - is a stretch in itself (you would have to be extremely careful), but posting the kind of rant that you started this thread with is, I'm afraid, just an insult.

The rules of the forum (like "read the manual") are applied in the way they are because it's very easy and quick for someone to tell you to read the manual. If we didn't do that then many user queries would probably go unanswered: the time required to find the answer for someone not willing to find it themselves is not worth it. For us, the purpose of "end user support forums" is, mostly, two things: identifying bugs that users may not be able to identify for themselves ("is it supposed to do X when I do Y?" "no, that's a bug, we'll fix it"), and identifying where our documentation is lacking ("I looked in the manual and I can't work out how to do X, the explanation in chapter Y doesn't cover it" "ah, that's true, we'll expand that section"). If *users* get a benefit out of it as well, by having their questions answered, that's a bonus, but the desired goal is that users would never need to ask for help in the first place, leaving us with more time to spend implementing cool features.

[chileboy]

Zenji -

I don't feel I can really add much - the other posts pretty much address the points you make...Torne's in particular is excellent in enunciating the goals and "mission" (if that is the right word) from the developers' point of view, not just for Rockbox in particular, but open source in general.  There's also a lot of reasonableness in all the posts about basic forum rules and expectations - such as perusing the manual and performing a few basic searches prior to asking a question or requesting a feature.

Anyway, I'd like to respond as a relatively new Rockbox user.  I've been in I.T. "my whole life" and consider myself pretty proficient with most things technological.  Yes, even I feel a bit intimidated when I first wade into the waters of something like Rockbox, and especially when posting for the first time or two.  I mean, there's no question that the folks you are hopeful will respond are so much more knowledgeable than yourself, you feel you are running the risk of seeming ignorant.  And there have been cases elsewhere where I feel some new users are treated that way.  But not here.

I don't see anywhere that any of the developers, moderators or even advanced users are rude or belittling to anyone.  Certainly not in the original thread(s) you reference - the responses, while to the point, are polite.  When you say

I'm just someone who wandered into this 'place' and therefore sees it with the fresh eyes of the outsider. And it is 'NASTY' ! Psychologically SFU !

I absolutely do not see that - even with "the fresh eyes of the outsider".

I truly believe you've taken offense where none was meant.  Remember, as Torne said, most, if not all, of these folks have "real" jobs - I often wonder how they find the time to respond at all, let alone continue development.

As a general rule, I've learned that you can earn a lot of respect if you can show you've put a bit of effort into learning about something you're obviously benefiting from, that others - as you yourself recognize - have put an incredible amount of time and effort into, for little or no personal gain.

Ok, I'm done. 

- Mark

[TexasRockbox]

People tend to attack that which they don't understand.

Instead of adopting (or at least trying to understand) the Rockbox culture (for lack of a better word) he instead, proposes his own vision of what the culture should be and that it would be better for everyone involved.  It would be as if I just wandered into the UK, said nice country but get rid of the Union Jack, dissolve Parliament, boot the stodgy royalty and everyone speak Urdu.

If I was thinking that, I should at least get to know the people first, before proposing it.

Going to try out that 3.8RC on the X5L.  Thank you very much!

(Happy Rockbox user for 3.5 years -- with a little patience one discovers that most of the features one wants eventually gets worked in)

[Tuffdog]

I've been watching the zune community for a while and have found it is much the same as the rockbox community. The best programmers are always people who are in the industry and have full time jobs. This is why they often do most of their work in their spare time. Most will make features they want because it will keep them motivated to finish the project. Support by the manufacturer of the device always effects the mod community, be it through offering incentives, or adding hack protection. If you want something done, do it yourself and if your lucky find someone to work on it with you. Always post your work at every major stage, as if you get tied up with other things (such as family, drama, work) no one will be able to work on the project, or be intrested in doing the idea from scratch as they are unsure if someone else is doing it from. I think some change in the culture would be nice by introducing a new feature to the site where you could offer rewards or incentives if people complete or do a decent amount of work on a plugin or feature. People or companies could offer such prizes and this would build some intrest on working on specific things (though science does say you still want to personally do something to go through with it, not the promise or rewards). You should frankly be grateful there still is a culture, rather than a ghostown of a project such as SansaLinux, or Ipod Linux at this point. We should reward developers for doing what they want, not ridicule for not having the same passion in certain areas as you do. More direction would be nice, but not a required at this point (though maybe in the future this may be needed)