Life is controversial by its very nature. I'm not saying you have to go full teenage edgelord, but we have to learn to accept that everyone has different lives and experiences. These experiences lead to different viewpoints and opinions. I have very different viewpoints than even myself a few years ago. I imagine a completely different person in a different city or country would disagree with at least some of them. And you know what? I am okay with that.
I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything. I wouldn't mind them sharing their opinions on things if they didn't have teeth. Somehow the professionally oppressed are backed by nearly every major corporation on the planet. It makes me overreact. I don't like it. Most people don't like it. Everything they say sounds like "Pick up that can, Citizen."
I think a lot of people are feeling this and its probably what is pushing people in to extreme ideologies. You start off getting pissed off at actions like this and then you slowly gravitate as far away from these people as possible.
Honestly I think public social media entirely is a bad experiment and probably needs to be stopped. It used to be that you would know your audience and make jokes to suit, some people are more sensitive to certain things but you would know this and avoid otherwise fine jokes. But now on the internet the audience is literally everyone so you are always going to step on someones toes. Even by something as tame as a rant on encrypted saves and IAPs.
The medium of exchange has transitioned from smaller local groups to larger groups. It's like a group of people all screaming in a room trying to talk over one another. The only voices that stand out are the most outrageous ones. Large group forums have less depth. You can see this on websites like Reddit, where the most popular subreddits are reactionary and shallow, while smaller ones have more depth, ideas, and conversation.
I think you can see it in this thread, too, where many people are aghast at the maintainers' decision to remove the piece and citing it as evidence that jokes aren't allowed on the internet anymore.
What surprises me the most is that in all the controversy, nobody tried to interpret the text as what it clearly was; a criticism of practices in mobile game development.
Instead, they got offended by the very thing the text was crticising, which is viewing the players of mobile games as a lower class of human that can and therefore must be milked for cash.
It feels like the whole controversy is just a misunderstanding of two groups having the same idea, but wording it differently.
Yeah, after reading the deleted text I couldn't understand the controversy, so I read some of that Twitter thread. They clearly had not understood what they had read, having missed all nuance as they made their very literal interpretation of the piece. It was bizarre to see them zoom in on little details, such as picking apart 'we/us' vs 'they/their', whilst missing the entirety of what was going on in the text (including why 'they/their' were used).
I guess, it isn't really their fault. Nobody chooses to misunderstand something(do they?). I just wish it had not led to the destruction of something interesting, but if it hadn't, then I would probably never have seen the deleted text; so, maybe, I should be thankful they brought it to my attention, even while wishing someone could have explained the text to them; or, at least, managed to convince them that sometimes it is best to ignore something you don't like, rather than go to war.
No - but people who write sarcastic or satirical things are deliberately choosing to make themselves more likely to be misunderstood. Why would you do that?
Humor, the hope that one is not alone in their beliefs, and that if there are a few others, you can filter for them by their reactions. Of course, this is a brute force method that has potential ... side effects.
Both absurdism and sarcasm present unrealistic scenarios and trust the listener not only to a) understand that the scenario presented is deliberately false but also b), to see the humour in resolving the distance between reality and the presented scenario.
Some things are communicated outside of the surface level of literal text that cannot be communicated within it. Even if they could be, some people enjoy nuance and complexity and think they are worthwhile for their own sake.
But really, this can't be explained in this fashion (and in this is the explanation...). Go look at a painting, read some poetry, listen to some music, enjoy a conversation with some friends, and ponder an interesting idea, and after all that reflect upon what you have experienced, and then, maybe, you'll be enlightened.
I've had a conversation with this person on Twitter as well, and immediately blocked me for not being "good faith" while she casually throws around terms like "dirtbag left" and "those East Block country devs are caustic". I'm all for a more inclusive community, but spewing toxicity against a certain political ideology and using classicism in the process makes you a bigger problem than the piece itself imho.
You can't in good faith use quotation marks when the quoted thing was not said. The "dirtbag left" comment was already quoted, not written as-is, and the other tweet said:
"I’ve seen some impressively caustic stuff from that area at times."
Also you and other in this threads seem determined to use them as a scapegoat for all that happens around this joke.
I don't think the problem is with twitter here. Let people have opinions, even if you think they are useless. They are opinions after all. Your issue should be with the maintainers who will remove any content on the slightest objection to it in a bid to do the "right" thing by whatever group of people got offended by it.
I think we should be blaming anyone who complies with the mob, since that is the only thing that gives the mob power. If everyone just ignored them, this phenomenon would peter out quite fast.
Don't underestimate the power of a mob, even an internet mob. They can and have done a lot of damage to people, even those who don't directly engage with them (especially when they attack those who don't have a lot of individual power: ironically while those who participate in them seem to have a sense of 'punching up', they can only hurt those for which they are as a collective punching down).
But they can only do damage as long as HR departments and conference organizers and whatnot bow to the demands of people on twitter. Of course they have done a lot of damage but almost all of it indirectly. The people who actually execute on it in meatspace are at least as much to blame, IMO.
I mean the whole thing is a total non-issue. Someone writes a silly screed in docs, someone notices it and points it out, maintainers of a project that wants some semblance of professionalism remove dumb screed.
As a maintainer I wouldn’t even remove it for content but just because it’s clearly a detriment to the document.
It used to be that you could be a bit selective with your circle of friends and you would only have to deal with "less capable" people in family meetings a couple of times a year because you don't get to choose those.
And since they could barely operate a computer there was some natural barrier of entry that kept these people away from the internet. Then phones and apps happened and the all flooded to social media and here we are. They come from all sides of the political spectrum, so pretty much the only way to avoid them is to stay off social media.
And at the same time, widespread rejection of certain things people do and say is a critical part of changing popular ethics. I'm not saying I agree with every contemporary expression of wokeness. But we have made some progress in part because when someone said something "offensive" to their coworker or acuiantance the offended party told that person to stop.
When people stop going along with things is when what is acceptable begins to change. Unfortunately, public shaming and ostricism seems to be a fundamental part of evolving social mortality.
No one would think twice if this document contained something truely offensive or hateful and the maintainers refused to remove it. But the fact is people have taken this so far to the point that it’s not a means to an end, it’s a hobby. And now we have harmless jokes being taken down.
Also, the piece that got taken down is a piece that essentially mocks morally bankrupt companies for abusing people. That's about as opposite for what the woke thing stands for (or at least is supposed to) as you can get.
Yeah, I'm not citing this circumstance as a quality case. But the OP connected this to the general wokeness narrative. And while I have very ambivalent feelings about the current rash of performative indignation, I think it's important to point out that such pearl clutching and scandal is not new and has functioned to change society in ways most people probably agree with (i.e. the decline of tacit sexual harassment and casual racism).
> But we have made some progress in part because when someone said something "offensive" to their coworker or acuiantance the offended party told that person to stop.
It has been a while since last time it was the actual offended party who complained. Nowadays, people who complain are people who pretend to be offended in the name of other people who, in the mind of the first ones, could be offended.
Back in... saner times, there was a saying: "don't feed the trolls". Unfortunately it seems people have been doing that far too often, and now they have grown big and strong.
There's a lot to unpack here and I'm feeling very confused as to what you're talking about. Godot is not a major corporation, and you seem to be dismissing someone's complaint as "fake-wokism" and "professionally oppressed" when the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people (mobile game players). What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here? I personally can see why someone would be offended by such cynical and condescending statements, even though I am not in that group.
Also you're saying their opinions have "teeth" as if making a complaint is some kind of attack on something because it could potentially cause a change to happen, but if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on? If you find yourself overreacting to someone else expressing their opinion, perhaps that is another opportunity to expand your viewpoint, instead of overreacting?
The joke in question is very clearly at the expense of multi-billion dollar companies using really cynical tactics to make money from the aforementioned mobile gamers. This kind of corporate fake-wokeism that uses its power to insist that punching up by criticising them is punching down, and of cynically invoking the powerless in order to silence critics in ways that wouldn't work if it wasn't really helping the powerful, is getting really tiring. Not only that, it feels like there's something deeply, fundamentally wrong with our current social justice activism that leaves it not only structurally incapable of actually representing the powerless, but also using its power so aggressively against anyone who challenges its claims to be doing so that it's actively harmful to any attempt to genuinely do so.
Yes, many times, but I don't see how that is relevant. Technical documentation is not a comedy performance, you read it to learn how to use the product, not to develop your sense of humor. Why would there be jokes in there made at the expense of any group? Within the documentation, it makes perfect sense for these projects to ban any of these kind of jokes that could anger people, if what you really want is cynical hot takes and snarky jokes, there seems to be no shortage of that on HN and Twitter and other places that aren't technical documentation.
Could not possibly disagree more. The tech industry has always had humor lurking around. Easter eggs, little jokes. BeOS wrote their error messages in Haiku. It was a lot of these little things that endeared you too a product.
Communication and engagement often require some humor. The first programming book that helped me grok programming was full of humor and stupid cartoon drawings.
And let us not forget Godot is open source. People do this for fun and put in their own time and effort. I don’t think anybody should really be telling them what they can and cannot be doing while pursuing their passion for your benefit.
The constant stream of little quips and inside jokes that endear you and I to things also can be off-putting and drive outsiders away. I am sorry but I've spent my years explaining so many strange things that nobody understands like "Guru Meditation," and it's not really funny any more when you have to keep explaining the joke. And those are just the little innocent gags, it's much much worse when the joke is disparaging someone.
It also doesn't seem like this was written by some random open source contributor, it seems it was done by the maintainers, who are being paid to work on it by their patrons. They absolutely do have to answer to those patrons. While people seem to like to assign all blame for things on twitter commentators for whatever reason, it's likely the actions they took are the result of feedback from the patrons.
> I am sorry but I've spent my years explaining so many strange things that nobody understands like "Guru Meditation," and it's not really funny any more when you have to keep explaining the joke.
New people are born every day and we have to explain to them a lot of well-known things, again and again. This is how everything works, not only humor. I do not want to lose great things like "guru meditation" just because some people like you are tired of explaining them.
I don't know you mean by lose, the original Guru Meditation is already long gone. If you have your own thing and you want to keep the joke alive by spending your time fielding a bunch of support requests from confused users asking what "Guru Meditation" means then be my guest, I can't take that away from you.
My feeling is just that if you change that message from "Guru Meditation" to "you are an ass hat" or something rude like that, you will probably get many more complaints.
> And those are just the little innocent gags, it's much much worse when the joke is disparaging someone.
This may be a stupid question, but why is it such a bad thing that they are disparaged? Maybe Godot doesn't want them as patrons, and are they even contributing that much?
Humour is humour, and shouldn't be limited only to designated stages. I personally enjoy technical documentation or even math books that contain humour. I'd even say it's quite common in the geek culture, so I'm not sure what your opinion is based upon.
Sometimes I do enjoy that too, but I can also see how other people don't enjoy that type of humor and wouldn't want to be subjected to being mocked. You can't force people to think a joke is funny especially if you're intentionally doing it outside one of those designated stages, often the context is the entire reason the joke is funny. It's one thing if you're picking between 100 math books on the same subject, and you pick one of them that contains the humor that you like, but that's different from when you're shipping the official documentation which is supposed to be the one source of truth for the project. Users can't just pick a different book there if they find your jokes off-putting.
> Sometimes I do enjoy that too, but I can also see how other people don't enjoy that type of humor and wouldn't want to be subjected to that.
How is anyone subjected to it? No one is being forced to read anything. It is wrong to remove text in the anticipation of the possibility of someone coming along and being offended by it.
As far as I can tell people are being forced to read it if they want to learn that particular API. It wasn't some third party blog or tutorial. (Please correct me if I am wrong about this)
You are unlikely to need to read that part of the API unless you want to mess with a very specific feature (encryption in save files).
Even then, text (as a format) allows you to easily skip to parts you care about. If I was looking for docs on this API, I'd skip to examples and read paragraphs above them if code is unclear.
I also wholeheartedly disagree with your stance that there is a time and place for humour: humour is for every occasion (and I know of cases where it was successfully applied in the saddest of moments, someone losing a loved one)!
You are also guilty of assuming that someone is offended where you are not! Sensitivity and empathy are needed, but we can't hear from the really offended ones because people who are offended in their stead just add the noise.
I still upvoted your comments because I also disagree with downvotes being used for disagreement :)
I'm not sure what you mean, the entire point of technical documentation is that it explains a technical subject, that is the definition of the phrase. You could add other things but then it stops being just that.
Sorry, one can read "just that" in two ways there, "it at all" or "only".
To carry on with your intended meaning, what is the problem if the technical documentation is more than just technical documentation? We're talking about a paragraph here, maybe 0.1% of the documentation. Are you making a claim that at some percentage of non-technical content the documentation becomes illegitimate?
I'm honestly just trying to understand what you're getting at.
Possibly I should have said "it stops being only that," that might have been more clear. The problem with making that 0.1% into something else is that people still get annoyed and distracted by it because it's not what they expected, and they complain, which is exactly what happened here.
That isn't really a valid option though, if this kind of thing is in the official documentation, and you have to read it in order to use that particular feature. It would be there every time you have to refer back to the documentation or refer someone else to it.
edit I'm getting downvoted for this. Please argue why you disagree. This is an honest attempt at breaking open a ground for open discourse. I'm open to discussion. If you feel this is pedantic, that's fine, but I would ask you kindly to move on and don't engage with this.
Some people are trying to turn "retracting a statement and apologizing as soon as a single individual states they feel offended" into a categorical imperative which every human ought to obey.
That's the extreme opposite to that other polarizing categorical imperative: "I am able to say whatever I want, regardless how anyone else feels about that."
Categorical imperatives don't work out at all in interpersonal relationships. They leave zero room for empathy or compromise, they dismiss any personal responsibility to take a step back and reflect on the context.
Like this:
> the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people (mobile game players). What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here?
One corollary of that categorical imperative is that any and all suffering is absolute. Everything is a 5/5. There's no nuance or room to take this apart through critical questioning.
However, asking critical questions, trying to understand and listening to one another are paramount.
Can you be sure this is targeted at mobile game players? Have you read the tutorial page and are you perceiving things at face value? Have you considered that satire can deliver a valid criticism via irony, pastiche, wit,...? Could this also be a warning or a put down directed at mobile game companies who tend to consider gamers as consumers through their business models?
These aren't questions meant to hurt, they are meant to understand where someone is coming from.
Even so, words do have an impact. They can be used to intentionally hurt. You can use words to clearly convey that you don't perceive the other person as an equal human being. You can use words to dismiss any form of equal reciprocity as to how you and the other behave/act/listen towards one another. That's where insults, disrespect, violence, discrimination and the like come in. And once those are out in the open, you can't take that back.
There's a difference between the former and the latter. A satirical piece questioning a particular behavior is one thing, a piece that intentionally attack individuals themselves is something entirely else.
Asking critical questions is about asserting the intentions of the author, figuring out where they come from, why they put a satirical piece in technical documentation in the first place. You can draw your own conclusions, but unless you ask those questions and go find answers, your conclusions will be conjecture at best, and turn into misunderstandings fueling further polarization deadening any further debate at worst.
> if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on?
Interpersonal relationships are complex and multi-layered, meta at many times. All the world is a stage, and there's always an audience around. The point of publishing a satirical piece that targets mobile game businesses isn't to show them "the errors of their ways". It could also be read as a warning to mobile game players: beware from whom you purchase games.
While I'm addressing you directly with my comment, I'm very much aware that this is a public forum and there's an audience lurking and reading this.
Good communication is a complex skill to pick up. That's why communication science, journalism and PR experts are a thing.
>Can you be sure this is targeted at mobile game players? Have you read the tutorial page and are you perceiving things at face value? Have you considered that satire can deliver a valid criticism via irony, pastiche, wit,...? Could this also be a warning or a put down directed at mobile game companies who tend to consider gamers as consumers through their business models?
I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.
I am not sure what you mean by some people are trying to turn something into a categorical imperative, I didn't see any statements to either of those ends. I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.
>I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece
I don't want to be the one to bring this up, but your posts indicate you're less skilled in reading comprehension than this satire is asking for from it's audience.
My personal tastes and goals in technical writing aside, I don't find the reading comprehension level this satire was written for to be incongruous with reasonable assumptions about the audience of godot's documentation.
> I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.
It's really simple: "If you have questions: just ask, communicate, listen and don't jump to immediate conclusions from the get-go". That's not too high a bar to set, no?
Suppose someone turns to me and says "You have written a piece, that's how I feel and my conclusion is that you need to retract your statement." My first question to them will be: "Well, have you considered asking and listening to me first before you jump to that conclusion?"
> I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.
Did these people ask why the piece was included in the documentation in the first place? Did they try to understand the intentions of the author? Was their an open debate about this at any point?
If you don't find a debate online, have you asked them if they talked to the author directly, or are you joining a bandwagon without asserting whether or not their suffering might be caused by misunderstanding the intentions of the authors of that piece? Or worst, caused by an unwillingness to consider the intentions of the authors of the piece?
What you're saying is entirely backwards though, from a pure maintenance perspective, the purpose of documentation is actually to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on answering questions and responding to debates. If you receive a lot of questions about what it's supposed to mean, the documentation is not doing its job and needs to be clarified.
And that's a completely valid point. But then we're discussing something entirely different: the usefulness of documentation. A satirical piece conveying criticism on the game industry clearly doesn't help a developer solve a concrete technical problem.
You could extend that to anything that doesn't touch upon the technicalities of the Godot gaming engine.
But that's entirely distinct from the initial point of debate: does this satirical piece offend or doesn't it?
To borrow some language from the piece, how much would you appreciate it if someone put a paragraph in the documentation saying "CaptArmchair is a poor soul filled with tremendous existential angst, who needs to be prevented from thinking so the tremendous agony of realizing CaptArmchair's own irrelevance does not again take over CaptArmchair's life" ? Even if it was a joke, would you really want that in there? (For disclosure, if it was me, I personally would probably not want any hostile things about me written across random open source documentation, so hopefully I am not cursing myself to that by writing this post)
Now you're pulling a single sentence out of an entire context and dismissing that particular context. That's not how it works.
The next parts of that piece are equally important:
> But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and
assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible,
because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore
run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have
nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing
their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
> No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to
encrypt savegames and protect the world order.
Clearly "protect the world order" is hyperbole. It is clearly signalling that none of the above is to be taken literally.
Moreover, the "prevents them from thinking" is another form of signalling. It's meant to say "Think about who you're buying from, and what you're buying into." What is absolutely not meant to say is this: "your experience as a gamer is invalid because you buy into a questionable product/service/business model."
The entire piece is satire. It's self deprecating. Satire asks that the reader takes a step back, self deprecates for a minute... and then reflects on what's actually being said.
I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything. I wouldn't mind them sharing their opinions on things if they didn't have teeth. Somehow the professionally oppressed are backed by nearly every major corporation on the planet. It makes me overreact. I don't like it. Most people don't like it. Everything they say sounds like "Pick up that can, Citizen."
Archive of twitter thread that started this: https://archive.md/VpYl2