Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce5/15/2023, 4:03 PM

Blorg³ @blorgblorgblorg

Blorg³ @blorgblorgblorg5/15/2023, 2:21 PM

seeing multiple backlash posts this morning about users complaining about the awful FOSS user experience

and i'm not really interested in responding directly and starting shit with passionate strangers who have different priorities/philosophies than i do in good faith, but i do want to say a little about why yes, we do get to complain about this.

it is not the user's responsibility to fix this

it is such a fundamentally capitalist notion that if you have a bad time you should shut up, do labor, or pay money. it is very strange to me to see that false choice presented in a post that also complains about capitalism.

none of developers' struggles with finances and time are on me. i will never stop complaining about my own bad experiences ever, and it's my right to do so. i am not obligated to consider the struggles of strangers before i am vocal about my own struggles. foss developers are not uwu smol beans who take scanners-style psychic damage when i say their logo sucks or i had a miserable time installing their server software.

nobody has to earn the right to complain.

this particular fight is not between billion dollar corporations and open source devs, it involves users

it is such a fucking weird smokescreen to position users who have a shit time self-hosting or using linux as having taken the side of microsoft or some shit in a two-sided conflict. users have no stake here except their own self-interest.

atypically, i actually do have an ideological stake in that i am poor and go out of my way to use foss tools if they are available and work right. i am in fact on the side of open source, philosophically. but i still prioritize my own day-to-day convenience over that ideology, so i use windows and steam and discord because the alternatives on offer do not work as well for my use cases. if viable open source alternatives existed, i would love to use them instead. if my skillset matched up, i would love to contribute. if i won the lottery, i would probably put some six-digit bounties on making the existing alternatives viable, because they're really not far!

the dumpster diving raccoon analogy, while funny, isn't accurate

it's a real clever lashout at corporations who exploit free labor, but it can't be applied to individual users! if you put your free code in a well-presented bowl on a pedestal by the sidewalk with a little placard that says "please take one :)" then passersby cannot be faulted for assuming it's not dumpster trash.

but also that post was always directed at big corps and not users anyway.

in the end,

i am not asking foss devs to pull more time and money out of thin air. i think they should shift their priorities with the time they do have. i think user experience is undervalued by too many programmers. i am allowed to have this opinion, in spite of having no money or power to enforce it.

#effortposting

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in reply to @blorgblorgblorg's post:

John Colagioia @jcolag5/15/2023, 7:28 PM

I both agree and disagree.

People do need to prioritize interfaces, absolutely. But that's true everywhere; I've only worked at one company that hired a dedicated HCI expert, and that wasn't in the past fifteen years. Everyplace else, the interface was whatever the developers decided to write or (worse) asking the nearest artist or - not joking, here, unfortunately - a random woman working at the company what we could do to improve things.

However, it's also highly capitalist that the user of software gets to be a passive consumer who has a right to a completed project. The software should be the centerpiece of a community to join, not something that that people download and call worthless for not being a clone of the corporate thing.

Granted, I spend a lot of time also messing around on the "Free Culture" side, where even books and films might just be artifacts that bind a community.

Blorg³ @blorgblorgblorg5/15/2023, 10:36 PM

I hold corporate stuff to the exact same standards and it fails at least as often. In particular I actually find GIMP to be more usable at this point than the bloated subscription versions of photoshop. I would probably switch full time to linux mint if I didn't have awful vendor lock-in via directX games and the thing I use to make the commercial blu-ray discs I own playable in VLC. I am constantly furious at Microsoft and Adobe, significantly moreso than the FOSS community.

I do not feel I have the "right" to a completed project, nor do I want things to just be clones of the corporate versions.

This post is targeted at the FOSS stuff because I read two different back-to-back posts this morning specifically saying anyone who doesn't contribute code or money has no right to complain.

John Colagioia @jcolag5/16/2023, 7:55 PM

I'm not questioning your dedication to "the cause," and do understand (and largely empathize with) the distinction that you're trying to make, but this is the second time that you've suggested that it's inappropriate to have a responsibility for what's (in effect) a public asset. I mean, you present "you should shut up, do labor, or pay money" as a bad choice, and rephrased that in your reply to me as "anyone who doesn't contribute code or money has no right to complain," but what's the magical good option?

I don't ask that rhetorically. Someone has to put in that time. If you won't do it (an entirely valid choice), won't fund it (I don't honestly think that money is a solution to any of these problems, either, but money brings in labor), and don't believe that you're entitled to the developers' time (which you've just assured me), then I don't see any resolution that gets those complaints heard by anybody who cares.

In a lot of ways, this is politics (which might be why this touches a nerve, since it echoes so many problems in modern politics), where complaints are useless unless it's impossible to ignore them. Friends of the decision-makers get weight added to their voice. Paying money gets weight added to their voice. The people who take the decision into their own hands have a lot of weight added to their voices. Prominent members of the community have an iffier chance. And everybody else sounds like every other complaint.

But I do hope that you see a fourth path through that I don't.

Blorg³ @blorgblorgblorg5/16/2023, 8:49 PM

i didn't say it was a bad choice, i said it was a false choice. i do not have to select from those options, or a fourth one, or any options. i, and everyone else, including the people making the posts i'm responding to, get to talk shit.

it also feels like a misunderstanding here is what my goal was from complaining, because i think i would be crossing a line if i came into their github bug reports or the comments on their blogs and started saying this stuff. my intent is a bit more of just commiserating. i don't know how this gets fixed, but i bristle at the idea that people can't talk about it being a problem unless they are prepared to start solving.

i think the public asset responsibility stuff could be an interesting discussion to have but is outside the scope of what i've been talking about. i do not have the energy rn to establish a common definition of what a public asset is, or hash out what the criteria are for when someone becomes responsible for it, and how responsible.

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