That's awesome to hear! It takes an unbelievable amount of energy and sometimes frustrates us with how slow and deliberate we need to be with features.
Not responding is also communication. So I responded.
Privately, to the poster, with a long explanation of the kind of conversation on this topic I'd love to share, and publicly explaining why I wasn't going to chime in after having been asked to.
Most people are assuming my only response to him is the one they can see. They're mistaken.
It's probably relevant to note that we haven't heard from delvarworld, who I reached out to personally explaining in greater detail why I was opting not to reply and what we could do to create a discussion we'd both want to participate in.
You're only seeing the brief, public acknowledgement that I wouldn't participate despite being called out with an @ reply.
The tension only escalated when people from HN decided to chime in.
People can, and do, write in that tone on their personal blogs all the time. I have no issue with it and often in engage in hyperbole for effect in that arena.
The context you're probably missing is that my comment about the expected level of discussion isn't abrupt or coming from nowhere. In this particular venue you are specifically asked to keep the level of discourse higher than is typical on the web at large.
You're asked to do this when you first join and reminded with a summary before you are allowed to create your first two topics: http://discuss.emberjs.com/faq
I reminded the poster that his tone put him below the level of discussion the community has agreed to engage in within this particular space.
Posters can, and do, ignore this all the time and I often go around trying to prod people back towards civility and correct places for types of discussions:
In any other venue, I would 100% agree and would not have responded this way. Delvarworld's tone is totally mild and in keeping with typical internet culture.
And new topic posters are asked to keep that high standard in mind when posting. I'm sure his sarcasm was meant lightly, but it still deviates from the high quality of discussion I'd like to have, and rather than simply ignore a discussion where I was specifically invited, I opted to publicly explain why I wouldn't be participating.
What I failed to do, and this shows my failing to keep that high bar, is explain what we could change to make the discussion civil.
I have admitted that, publicly, very often, in other topics on discuss.emberjs.com, on websites, on twitter, on videos, and elsewhere. It's no secret I'd like to improve the documentation for Ember.js and I'm already well aware of the places that people are facing difficulty right now.
I've been extremely vocal in soliciting actionable feedback on that. I'd like to help!
Discourse isn't for making places like hackernews, where a playful, sometimes discouraging culture of dickitude is acceptable and encouraged. The goal of Discourse (a "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit") and our use of it is to create a place where civil discussion can take place to improve Ember.js as a framework.
Delvarworld's tone strayed into territory I don't think remains civil because of his use of sarcasm:
"are you serious?"
"oh god this is going to be fun, isn't it?"
"by the awful grace of god"
"3 more results linking to the first dead article! FANTASTIC!"
And so I signaled that I empathize with his frustrations (because I do) but I can't participate in that discussion because it violates community norms I'd like to uphold. If he'd like to rephrase his topic, I'd be glad to help.
Ego and pretension have nothing to do with it. Contributing to OSS is something I make a personal decision to do with my time. I wish I had an infinite amount of time, but I don't. Most people associate me with Ember.js, but I'm very active elsewhere. Did you know I regularly run through all the TodoMVC examples looking for bugs https://twitter.com/trek/status/313015370728501248 ? Most people don't, because it's just something I quietly do. Less quietly now, I suppose.
In addition to working on OSS, I'd love to maybe find a nice boy to date (https://github.com/trek/lonely_coder), see my friends, visit my aging, ailing parents more often, maybe catch a moving once in a while, or eat a meal I'd don't grab on the go running from one obligation to another.
Like most OSS contributors, this isn't my job. It doesn't pay my bills or put food in my belly. I do it because I'd like to improve the tools I work with and share those improvements with the larger tech community. In the finite time I can offer, I have to make decisions about where to expend energy. I choose to do that in places where I can have the most impact. I don't feel that I can be helpful when people approach with sarcasm. Rather than remaining silent, I let people know I'm happy to engage when we trend towards civility.
Is this entirely true? Clearly cleanup of event names like "loadedmetadata" is related to the audio element but '_bubbleProfilingEvent', '_logEvent', and general .unbind calls are on backbone-related objects, yeah?
Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview.
Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).
In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".
"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."
The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore.