Can we please at least try to be a little more objective in how we use language?
You may agree or disagree with what Basecamp, now 37signals, did but the company did not “implode”.
Many of their employees - one third - did disagree with what they did and chose to leave.
Was their leaving a protest? Well, maybe. But IIRC they were offered very generous severance terms, which would have made that choice much easier to make and so perhaps robs it of some of its value as a protest.
And what about the company? Well, as far as I can tell, they seem to be doing fine. They’re offering junior devs, was it 125k or 150k US fully remote? Somewhere in that ballpark anyway. And just about anywhere within a certain range of time zones. That’s not a sign of a company that’s struggling.
I have read DHH’s blog post about London, and I am a Brit, so think I can offer a somewhat qualified point of view here. DHH is correct about the demographic changes in London over the past decades, but he’s absolutely wrong to cast Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) as some kind of good faith activist standing up for the rights of ordinary British folks. The guy is a criminal and a low-life grifter. I can’t even really call him a fascist because I’m not convinced he really believes a word he’s saying. So I’ll stick with con-artist.
Back to the post: the most charitable interpretation I can put on it is that DHH simply hasn’t done his homework on Robinson. Is that an accurate characterisation? I honestly don’t know.
I wish I can see more summary, state facts mostly (with sources even they might not be reliable but better than just guessing without source)
I am not affiliated with either “side” so I allow myself this small outburst of my own because I see no receipts and the tone of this blog post set the stage for it.
Then why are you carrying water for exclusively one "side"?
Do I have to be neutral?
World views that disparage human beings where previously condemned but the overton window slowly shifted the topic of eg. "degenerates" back into the public. Even though we are thankfully not quite there to talk openly about a final solution (that time might come!).
It started with "edgy humor" and ambigous statements and slowly increased in misantrophy and number.
Ofc it is predominantly the political right that, openly or indirectly, revolves around conservative identity politics and in turn is more susceptible to disgust driven out-group biases.
But this behaviour can be seen on the political left too. As a reaction to the right communicating in dog whistles, they got kind of conditioned on it too and that is IMO the prime motivator of this blog post.
Jared White could have done a better job by collecting more examples of such "hate speech" but to be pedantic here, DHH -- like any reasonable person -- should avoid ambiguity and take a big step back from any ambiguous public communication or at least clarify.
When this open, clear and construstive communication doesnt happen, you can observe stuff like this. Name calling and blame around "banalities". Its just the surfacing part of a bigger conflict, which can be hard to pin point since one side is (intentionally) ambiguous/evasive/ignorant.
Reading DHHs quoted X post is a good example of deteriorating communication:
> @dhh: While the rest of the tech world has mostly moved on from the nonsense of the early 2020s, there are still a few ardent ideologues fighting the last war on Reddit, believing that ridiculous accusations like “nazi” and “fascist” still carry any weight
I wouldnt put a text together, where (1) i am not adressing the other sides concerns, (2) frame them negatively and (3) normalize allegations, others take very serious (nazi, fascism) as wheightless when i am in charge of managing (and uniting) a community. This is a serious red flag.
All the maintainers quit, including the single security engineer. The code is now unmaintained. There's a good argue that security has been reduced.
“First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states [party confetti emoji]
What this guy feels about that:
I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries
It's too much. I don't have the patience for this. The complaint is so out of left field I have to assume DHH and the RubyCentral guys are right.
It seem impossible for some people to allow anyone with dissenting views to their own to even exist anymore, pretty sad set of affairs.
What's the old quote? "Your right to swing your fist ends at the other guys nose?" Perhaps we'd all do better keeping that in mind.
What's that about? Who are DHH enemies here?
What is even weirder is that towards the end, after all of the pie throwing, the author ends with "I am done. I am done with this drama." and suggests building a separate ecosystem for Ruby from the ground up
I can barely take the article serious at this point. I am afraid the author caused more damage and confusion than good, if anything, this might even make people feel like what RubyCentral did was right
That's a funny way to say that he asked for people to refrain from politics when they're at work and a third of the company said no and left, I really struggle to see this in a bad light. I don't have beefs on this whole discussion and only sporadically follow DHH blog posts, I think the main conflict people are having with his views is that work is not just work anymore, people are expected to share a vision, to have the same cliques, to live the same live, work became for some people what family, church or the local community used to be for most before that. See for example https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-company-isnt-a-family-... or his book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work".
I was talking to a friend who worked in the US and the UK about the culture differences, and he mentioned how the US leaned more towards a family culture where the UK was more of a pub culture. On a family you feel required to cope with whatever bs is thrown at you because you're supposed to stick together. On a pub the more off putting you are the more chances people are not gonna talk to you.
Essentially, he is posting articles[1] saying he wants fewer non-white people in London.[2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303111
Which sucks because there is real fascism in some parts of society. But DHH? I have no idea.
>> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
The quote clearly doesn't "cheer on death via starvation". Given that, I'm extremely doubtful about the author's other claims that DHH is a fatphobe, homophobe, thisphobe, thatphobe.... If the author can be this silly and/or dishonest about something he himself quotes, then why should I trust anything else he says?
I then went and checked one of his links to DHH, which he describes as being "hateful to therapists". Here, check it yourself: https://world.hey.com/dhh/building-competency-is-better-than...
Calling this "hateful to therapists" is just ridiculous. DHH is arguing that there are good alternatives to therapy! There is nothing remotely close to hate in the whole article.
Maybe DHH is actually a total Nazi - I'd never heard of the guy till today. What we can clearly see is that Jared White is either a liar or an idiot.
I'm sorry to see this sort of nonsense still thriving, and it is 100% right that it should have been left behind. More than that - people who slander others deserve to be shamed themselves.
Plus there are perfectly valid reasons to prefer some categories of people over others. It has nothing to do with hate or fascism, it's only natural.
I'm a DINK (double-income no kids) and I don't feel the hate of DDH, I only see someone who thinks it's worthwhile to be a parent and it's a dead end not to be. It's technically true and you can't argue against that anyway.
> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
How is this offensive? Seems like a nothing burger.
I don't know anything about this topic other than what was in this post.
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man [...] who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
I do not understand how such conclusion could be drawn, I even started asking myself how any of this was related to the current issue with RubyCentral and RubyGems?
I will say DHH's post on Trump's return is like reading something from an alternate universe (https://world.hey.com/dhh/mega-a0f62cd4). What optimism was there in Trump's second campaign? Trump promised exactly what he's doing: retribution, tariffs, self-dealing and corruption, accelerating climate change, etc. I'm curious DHH's assessment of the past ~9 months and how it matches with his original "optimism".
As someone who did enjoy his writing it's quite shocking and really very disappointing.
