And he really isn't participating in a constructive manner. He gets away with his obnoxious behavior in other threads by intermingling his opinions and generalizations in with the substantive discussion.
I'm not going to engage him on the substance of what's happening in the Rubysphere, because he has made clear that he no intention of helping either move the discussion along, or to solve any problems.
That he occasionally raises legitimate points is irrelevant, others have raised the same points in constructive manners, and there have been fruitful discussions on the topics. Engaging this particular guy is only feeding a troll who is distracting from the conversation.
Regretfully there are two opposing goals that must be served here.
The discussion about how Rubygems is going to move forward is really of vital importance to the ruby community. Making sure that there is a civic engagement with Rubygems and the tooling that Rubyists rely on is something that really does need to be promoted better.
On the other hand, Pomdeterre's trolling is obnoxious and unhealthy behavior that HN shouldn't tolerate. Like I said above. Being right is important, but it's not the only important thing. You can be right and still be an asshole who's being a drag on a community, or an organized effort to do something.
I agree that my criticism of PomDeTerre's behavior does not touch on the heart of the discussion, but I hope you can understand that that was in fact the intention. It is not the subject matter that he is discussing that's the problem. It is his conduct.
It's unfortunate that it's distracting from the substantive discussion, but we shouldn't have to put up with people acting like this, or interfering with efforts to fix problems.
If you take a look at his comments he's been all over these threads about ruby: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=PommeDeTerre
And he really isn't participating in a constructive manner. He gets away with his obnoxious behavior in other threads by intermingling his opinions and generalizations in with the substantive discussion.
I'm not going to engage him on the substance of what's happening in the Rubysphere, because he has made clear that he no intention of helping either move the discussion along, or to solve any problems.
That he occasionally raises legitimate points is irrelevant, others have raised the same points in constructive manners, and there have been fruitful discussions on the topics. Engaging this particular guy is only feeding a troll who is distracting from the conversation.
Regretfully there are two opposing goals that must be served here.
The discussion about how Rubygems is going to move forward is really of vital importance to the ruby community. Making sure that there is a civic engagement with Rubygems and the tooling that Rubyists rely on is something that really does need to be promoted better.
On the other hand, Pomdeterre's trolling is obnoxious and unhealthy behavior that HN shouldn't tolerate. Like I said above. Being right is important, but it's not the only important thing. You can be right and still be an asshole who's being a drag on a community, or an organized effort to do something.
I agree that my criticism of PomDeTerre's behavior does not touch on the heart of the discussion, but I hope you can understand that that was in fact the intention. It is not the subject matter that he is discussing that's the problem. It is his conduct.
It's unfortunate that it's distracting from the substantive discussion, but we shouldn't have to put up with people acting like this, or interfering with efforts to fix problems.