Ego and the skinning community

When I got to work on Monday morning, my coworkers were talking about how nasty the WinCustomize MB was that day and I learned about being called a "Nazi".

Over the weekend, I had been called names by dozens of people over in discussions on DeviantART. Jier began the festitivities by responding to Skin Primer that I wrote, on my own time mind you, for the community. For that effort, Jier called me "worthless" and said I was worse than Sam (the guy who owns eFront). Jier finished by saying he was going to dedicate himself to making freeware equivalents of everything in Object Desktop.

Bear in mind, Jier is supposed to be one of those "respected" members of the community. This isn't some random guy behaving like that. This is the guy who runs 545 Studios.

Then he went on to critique my article on XP skinnning (https://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/xpskinning.html). Amongst accusing me of lying, he fabricated a story that I had made claims that were untrue and created a thread on DA called "545 vs. Stardock". After quite a number of people came on proclaiming how awful they think I am (with a few people standing up for me at least) but with more people trying the moral equivalence angle which as people at the office knows, really bugs me. In most arguments, somebody is right and somebody is wrong (or at least more right than the other). Jier was wrong. Dead wrong. Completely wrong.

Meanwhile, l0c used his high access here to post a news item here. His access here allows his news submissions to bypass moderation. His news item accused TGTSoft of commiting a crime. This could be considered libel. And it became more obvious how much of a problem the news item was when the anti-Stardock contigency made the valid point that it sure looks bad having a Stardock owned site have a news item that accuses a competitor of a criminal act. So I responded and said that I would be deleting the news item in a few hours if there were no objections. A few hours later I did.

So then I woke up the next day to hear about being called a Nazi by l0c - Jier's roommate.

What would people have me say in response? I felt that a line had been crossed. And usually I could see the other person's point of view even if I don't agree with it. But this was beyond that. l0c, like Jier, was wrong.

I didn't know what to say in response. When adding up all the crap from over the weekend I needed a couple of days of introspection. Every virtual community has its own character.

For instance, the warez site that has been sending the rather nasty people to our site attacking us has a lot of really awful human beings on it. People who just don't abide by the ethical or moral standards that we take for granted. And I don't say that lightly. It was like a mirror universe of our community.

Or at least, I'd always assumed that our community was made up of generally good people. Sure, Paxx and myself might debate some point. Or Plastic and I may have a different perspective. But at the end of the day, a difference in opinion doesn't mean a difference in integrity.

Which brings me back to the post. By the time I got in, it was too late to just delete it without people seeing it. So I had to decide whether to defend myself or remain silent. Obviously the latter choice was the one I went with.

The "community" can be identified by a collection of discrete actions. The regulars define it. How would the community respond to something that was so blatently wrong?

Someone asked how I have been personally handling the abuse I've received of late. Well I'm human. For a moment I really wasn't sure if this "community" was something I wanted to be part of.

Take a step back for a moment. Shoggot asked, who hasn't done something really nasty during their years? I'd like to think most of the people I'd consider friends would never create a new post on one of our skin sites that existed soley to hurt someone else. I don't think most of you would.

What kind of community do we want to be? Arguing issues or disagreeing on things is normal. But some things are wrong. Some things are bad. Deeds considered acceptable by the community reflect on that community.

Our community doesn't accept warez on its sites for instance. That reflects well on us(I think anyway). And I'd like to think we don't accept people calling other people "worthless" or "Nazis" or worse. Or hopefully we don't accept trying to argue moral equivalence, that someone the person being attacked might have somehow deserved of this.

The good news seems to be that most people don't accept that. Certainly not here anyway. And our community is more united than it appears on the surface. The relationship between the admins of DeviantART and WinCustomize is extremely close.

But there is also a clash of cultures in our community. You could almost call it a fundamentalist movement within it that is ugly and nasty and it I think we just witnessed for the first time a clear rejection of it. That no one, regardless of who they think they are has the right to make viscious personal attacks on other members of the community.

I hope this incident lets us turn the corner, that civility will be considered a defining virtue as much as how many skins we make, or how much software we make.

Let me say as a software developer that being a software developer doesn't make me or any other developer more important or better than the skin authors or people who write FAQs or help people on the groups. We are all important parts of the community and we all deserve respect.

That's my little novel for the night.