Sep 24 2010

I find it incredibly hard not to be judgmental.

I’m not sure what part of my personality makes this happen, but even when I try to curb tearing down other people, I end up doing it anyway. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I think part of the problem is that these kinds of things are rewarded.

One of the reasons that I use my real name everywhere is to try to improve the civility of my discourse. When you’re anonymous, it’s really easy to be callous. And when I used a handle, I was even worse. But even now, I can think of three times when I accidentally was mean for basically no reason: That tweet, the Diaspora incident, and the only Hacker News comment I’ve ever deleted.

In all three of these instances, it’s not so much that I was wrong. It’s that I ended up presenting my criticisms poorly. I think I did a decent job with the Diaspora one, but people still took it the wrong way, so I failed to communicate. I’m certainly not infallible. I guarantee you there are n00b errors and security holes in my own codebases. So I really shouldn’t be so quick to judge. That’s all I have to say about that. I’ll just have to do better going forward.