Matt and I decied to move the ColdFusion Weekly to an archive on Posterous this week. So I decided to listen to our last show while we ere chatting on IM and this little gem came across my ears. I decided to transcribe it because it's worth it's weight in gold. Bear in mind that this show is from June 2008 which is nearly three years ago. I guess things haven't changed at all.
Matt: This timing is kinda interesting with the growing pains that are going on right now. It is obviously with all the open source going on, very - as people know from stuff I said -- it's a great time to be a CFML developer. We all need to figure this stuff out together. Some of the final things I'd like to say is that I hope that after people calm down a bit and that everybody can just be nice to each other. I'll just say that...
Peter: You know there is plenty of space out there. We're not fighting for same square foot of land... Matt: Yea, and the CFML community has always been a great community and we will continue to do that... The other thing I'm starting to realize is and that is probably why you'll see me participating in blog comments less... I'm getting to the point with that a lot of people are say things that they might not otherwise say to you if you were in person... Peter: Yea, whether your name is attached to your comment or not, there is a little additional bit of anonymity when it comes to commenting -- even if your name is there... just because you don't have to deal with somebody getting up in your face. Matt: Right, so I guess I would say -- try to think about as if you were talking with people in person. There is a lot of misunderstanding because of text communication -- everybody knows this -- there is no nuance to it and you don't know how people are delivering that message. This is just one of the things that causes things to spin out of control like they have a bit recently. Like I said, it's a fantastic time to be in this [CFML] world. It's only going to get better for everybody involved.
Let's see if this comment works (seems I have to log out of Facebook for the other options to show)! CFWeekly was a great show...it's too bad it was so tough to keep up.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that people can sometimes get carried away via comments or forums or (maybe especially) Twitter threads. Sometimes people can get vicious. I'm certain I've been guilty of overreacting on a comment thread in the past.
It's also important though to remember that misinterpreting/misunderstanding text communication (as Matt notes) isn't just confined to comments. Sometimes, we need to recognize when something we wrote is being widely misinterpreted and accept that perhaps we didn't communicate as best we could have, apologize and move on. I accept that it's a tough thing to do when you feel under attack.