Chicks on Community

Introduction

Howdy there, Internet People.

I am known as “chicks” and I’m here today to talk about the Internet and community.

Background

First, a little of my story to set the stage.

I started in the computer business before there was a web browser, but conveniently the Internet blew up at the right time for me and it has kept me employed or consulting steadily for 30 years.

In my formative years the computer business had a variety of thriving magazines. You could read in Wired or ComputerWorld how tech companies were striving to maximize their number of users by building a community and taking advantage of network effects.

For some companies this community was not only there to use the product, but the community provided a service to the company by moderating or providing tech support to other users.

Today

Now we seem to have the opposite story happening. Of course all of the magazines are gone, but we can read about the current dramas in mainstream news outlets or random blogs. But the story is… that we don’t need the community anymore. The corporate titans have enough users and losing half of them in some tantrum doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

3 examples

Twitter has lost sponsors and users through various poor choices, but notably, recently emergency responders are abandoning the platform because of rate limits and buggy APIs.

Reddit is in an escalating war with their moderator community. They’ve already destroyed a thriving community that used their API to build successful apps.

StackExchange also has moderators on strike. The company seems to think it knows more about moderation than the moderators do.

Common elements

These three examples relate to AI. Reddit and Twitter are altering APIs to discourage its use as training data for LLMs. StackExchange thinks AI generated content would be great for their sites and the moderators are clear that this is terrible. I don’t think that a fear of AI is worth destroying the thriving community that you already have, but that’s the only explanation I have for this.

Another common thread is the doubling down. The corporate titans feel like they own things and they know best. Of course I side with the moderators since they are closer to the problem. I wonder if this doubling down behaviour is a symptom of these times, but I don’t have any good evidence for that.

Red Hat

But lets turn to Red Hat. This one makes me sad, it does.

I always dreamed of working at Red Hat. For decades my aspiration was to work at Red Hat someday after I was accomplished enough to be worthy of such an honor. I loved that they were based in North Carolina, close to home. I bought Red Hat on CDs when that was a normal thing to do. I used centos as my desktop for a decade or so. I laughed at the Debian and Ubuntu folks for the recurring dramas, poor documentation, and rickety packaging systems.

But then Red Hat got bought by IBM. My first reaction was that my dream job was gone. I’ve often said that IBM is where good things go to die. And I would never want to help with that sort of process. So I knew the writing was on the wall for Red Hat, but there was no reason I couldn’t participate in the community by being a user and sending in bug reports. I also encouraged github projects to support RPM-based distributions. This could have continued, but Red Hat had just begun its integration with Big Blue.

First, they destroyed centos by doing the centos streams thing. Fine, the community can work around this and new distributions pop up. Alma and Rocky filled the gap created by Red Hat destroying centos and this was fine with me. I wasn’t happy that Red Hat had hired the centos folks and then chose to destroy the product, but the open source community is prepared to work around such corporate confusion.

Lately though, Red Hat has decided to turn the screws again. Now they’re trying to destroy Alma and Rocky. So far, they’re surviving, but it is now clear that it is time for me to give up. I’ve put 28 years of my life into this flavor of Linux, but now I’m moving on. I’m going to join the folks with the rickety packaging systems because they’re not owned by IBM and they’re not actively destroying their reputation and legacy.

Of course Red Hat was perfectly within their legal rights by making their recent moves. But they are willfully and capriciously destroying their community. At least it doesn’t seem to be for fear of AI. The Red Hat folks are afraid of freeloaders. They say this was a decision not influenced by IBM. Puh-lease! This would never have happened at the old Red Hat. All staff would have seen how these freeloaders are truly contributors or potential contributors.

Red Hat’s leadership once felt that it was important for the OS to be available to developers to test their software. Supposedly you can register for free and get a few licenses, but this is not needed with any of the competitors, so why is it necessary for Red Hat now? It seems pretty suspicious. Particularly when none of this was in reaction to Oracle. And the Oracle folks come out of the latest round of RHEL-volution looking like the good guys. Does anyone in IBM or Red Hat think that will help them keep making money for years to come? Apparently they do, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Conclusion

Finally, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m utterly mystified by established companies acting in a self-destructive way. Nothing is gained by destroying these communities.

I’m lucky that I didn’t have any investment in Reddit or Twitter. But StackExchange and Red Hat have been big parts of my life for decades and I’m sad to see them go down like this. I’ll probably continue participating in StackExchange to some degree, but I wouldn’t be upset to see another community replace them.

For Red Hat, I’m done. It isn’t my desktop anymore. I’m not building another rpm package. I’m not volunteering for anything. I’m not encouraging companies I work for or consult for to use Red Hat or IBM’s products.

I still have a glimmer of hope that some of these companies will realize they need to change course, de-escalate, and rebuild trust. But I’m not holding my breath or anything.

It’s just a thought. I hope you have a good day.