Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
This is the single most innocent quirk I have ever come across, if it stops you from sharing in the discourse you must not have had much to say in the first place. Seriously, our world is so fucked up that one person choosing to use an old letter for fun or personal enjoyment is sooooo far down my concerns list. You might as well be worried about what color shirt they are wearing right now.
Their writing style being hard to read doesn’t say anything about what would or could be said in response. “blocks yourself from having real conversations” is a fair assessment. They’re not blocking themselves fully, but from conversations with those who can’t or are not willing to read the unnecessarily inaccessible comments. I’ve certainly stopped reading/skipped many of their comments many times. And that says nothing about what their comments say, my interpretation of them, or what I would have to say about their content.
They’re free to continue. But you can’t not expect criticism for it on a discussion platform, and it remains a fact that it’s a barrier to accessibility.
this isn’t new. this has been happening for a while now. there is a reason there is so negative a response by most.
if it happens in a couple comments, its innocent. this is not. this is purposeful trolling. and just straight up annoying after you’ve seen it a thousand times.
The content of their comments has been much more thoughtful than many comments I see on Lemmy, and certainly conducive to further conversation. Downvotes don’t make something good/bad or right/wrong.
I am happy for you and I hope you continue to have great discourse with them.