jgrahamc's comment that I replied to is a mild example of this. If people are repeatedly raising the same concerns whenever HTTP/2 is discussed, then there are clearly issues with it that aren't being sufficiently dealt with. Writing off their problems as merely being "all the same old arguments", and discouraging discussion of them, doesn't exactly help solve these problems.
Things tend to be particularly bad when it comes to systemd, though. It isn't unusual to see censorship occur, either in the form of unjustifiable downmodding, comment deletion, or even the banning of participants, depending on the venue. We also are seeing it become increasingly difficult for Debian users, for example, to opt out of using systemd, or to easily switch to an alternative init system.
Instead of people with different preferences or interests working together, or even working independently, we're more often seeing one group of people quench the ability of the competing groups to participate or to even have choice. When discussion is stifled, and choice is taken away, the outcome will likely never be positive.
The fact that there's so much disagreement and discontent surrounding this should concern everyone involved. Trade-offs are being made that may benefit some people and organizations, but these trade-offs are also causing significant problems for others.
While there has always been some degree of disagreement regarding technological matters, I think we're really seeing a lot more of it these days, especially when it comes to projects that are open source, or standards that are supposedly open. HTTP/2 is a good example. But we've also got GNOME 3, systemd, how systemd has been included in various Linux distros, many of the recent changes to Firefox, and so forth.
Not only is this disagreement more prevalent, it's also much harsher than what we've seen in the past. Instead of seeing compromise, we're seeing marginalization. We're repeatedly seeing a small number of people force their preferences upon increasingly larger masses of unwilling victims. We're seeing consensus being claimed, but this is only an illusion that barely masks the resentment that is building.
What we're seeing goes beyond mere competition between factions with differing situations. We're seeing any sort of competition, or even just dissent, being highly discouraged, suppressed, or even prevented wherever possible. Those whose needs aren't being met end up backed into a corner and shunned, rather than any effort being put into cooperating with them, with helping them, or even just with considering their views.
This isn't a healthy situation for the community to be in, especially when it comes to projects that allegedly pride themselves on openness. We've already seen this kind of polarization severely harm the GNOME 3 project. We're seeing things get pretty bad within the Debian project. And the HTTP/2 situation hasn't been very encouraging, either.
It's currently showing 77% of the reports about Firefox as being 'sad', while only 23% are 'happy'. It gets even worse if Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are included, too. In that case, 86% of the reports are 'sad', and only 14% are 'happy'.
I expect disappointed users to be more likely to say something, but that's still an awfully large difference between the proportion of users who are 'happy' and those who are 'sad'. When I used Firefox for Android, I'm pretty sure it sometimes prompted me to give feedback, so it's not like only disappointed users looking to complain are being sampled.
I don't know how things work at Mozilla, but at any other software product company I've ever worked at, feedback results so out of whack would've raised a lot of eyebrows, and gotten a lot of attention. Much effort would have been put toward finding out what's wrong, and what can be done to fix it, especially if the results were consistently bad for weeks or months on end.
What if that's just because people have fewer problems with Nim than they have with Rust? The number of SO questions is a better measure of how often and how many people run into problems than it is a measure of overall popularity.
What is Nim's community like? I ask because I first learned about Nim a few weeks ago when some people were chatting about it on Slashdot. One comment [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6771453&cid=48860921] quoted from that day's Nim irc logs and well it was a little disturbing. There was a lot of insulting and name calling going on and it didn't leave a good impression on me. I don't want to judge the entire Nim community of course but I was taken aback by those many very negative quotations. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of animosity in the Rust irc channels I mean.
Things tend to be particularly bad when it comes to systemd, though. It isn't unusual to see censorship occur, either in the form of unjustifiable downmodding, comment deletion, or even the banning of participants, depending on the venue. We also are seeing it become increasingly difficult for Debian users, for example, to opt out of using systemd, or to easily switch to an alternative init system.
Instead of people with different preferences or interests working together, or even working independently, we're more often seeing one group of people quench the ability of the competing groups to participate or to even have choice. When discussion is stifled, and choice is taken away, the outcome will likely never be positive.