Anatomy of a Flame War

March 13, 2008 Russell Ball 18 comments

As some of you may have noticed, one of my recent posts, Are .NET Developers the American Tourist of the Software Industry, was the scene of some vigorous debate earlier this week. Since I was a history major in college, I figured that I would summarize it textbook style for those of you who missed it.

1. Causes

1.1 The Influential Blogger – Reg Braithwaite, who apparently wields an unholy amount of power with his delicious links and reddit karma, published a link to my post. Just prior to that I bought him a virtual cup of coffee via PayPal as his February Caffeinated Codey prize, which is probably what drew his attention to my otherwise obscure and quaint little blogging hole in the wall.

1.2 The Flame Bait – I unwittingly achieved a flame-bait hat-trick by making controversial assertions about Microsoft, programming languages, and politics/culture all in one post. Microsoft and politics are obvious triggers, but I think the key ingredient was definitely programming languages. This is a topic that many programmers apparently feel “more passionate about than their wives” as a commenter so succinctly phrased it. I can only imagine the carnage that would have ensued if I had managed to slip in a quip about religion as well.

1.3 Random Timing – Partly I think that the timing must have just been ripe for the periodic communal catharsis that a good flame war seems to provide. My new theory is that the collective developer psyche gradually builds up tension until it reaches a boiling point at which time any suitable triggering event would suffice. As with a big city riot, the triggering event rarely seems proportional to the results. The fact that I only contributed a couple of the almost 600 comments that were eventually generated by the participating flame warriors seems conclusive proof to me that I was mostly just along for the ride.

In short…

2. Chronology

2.1 Trolling as Inspiration – After playing around with Ruby, Python, and PHP for various reasons, I became curious about the relative popularity and current usage statistics for each one. After doing a little research, I stumbled upon the Tiobe index and summarized some of the things that I found surprising about it in a post on Programming Language Trends. The post briefly landed on reddit, at which point some nasty trolls poked fun at it. This caused me to do much philosophizing about the social dynamic that exists between .NET developers and the rest of the software industry. Based on my prior experiences as an exchange student, I came up with the American Tourist analogy and took what I thought to be the high road by deciding to devote more time outside my immediate technological culture. I wrote my thoughts in the now infamous post and promptly forgot about it as it languished in relative obscurity for several weeks, which is pretty much what happens to all of the posts I write.

2.2 Ground Zero – On Monday morning I was excited to notice Reg’s link love and some quickly rising website traffic, but I was busy at work so I didn’t get around to checking my email until lunch time. By then I already had over 50 comment emails waiting for me in my inbox and about 100 more on reddit. I was a little overwhelmed, so I decided to give them a quick scan and then set aside some time that night to reply. By then there were over 100 on my blog and over 300 on reddit and I realized that that it was a little too late to join the fray. Instead I decided to just be a silent observer and save my observations for some follow-up posts. At this point, I marveled at how Jeff Atwood manages to deal with the 100-300 replies he gets on almost every post. I don’t seem to be cut out for this.

2.3 Some Name Calling – I got called an idiot a few times, but mostly I was amazed at how the commenters were arguing back and forth with each other rather than targeting me. Although some of the comments are of the “Bill G. is a fag” variety, most of them were well thought out and some were even longer than my whole post. I was also baffled by how many different topics were covered and by how many people argued over foreign policy, which country invented which technology, and whether American tourists were really that obnoxious. I really only meant the analogy to be a starting point in understanding the community dynamics. I’m about as apolitical as you can get these days.

2.4 Phone Interview – I got an email requesting a phone interview about the post from James Maguire, a writer from an online publication called datamation. I was a little perplexed by the request, but agreed and had a pleasant thirty minute conversation with him the next evening. He wasn’t that familiar with the world of programming, so we spent some time talking about the basics at a high level.

2.5 Time to Apologize – I noticed a comment from Scott Koon (a.k.a Lazy Coder), which took me to task for using Phil Haack as an example of what is wrong with Microsoft. I quickly reread the section where I linked to Phil and briefly panicked because I thought that I accidentally insulted a guy I really respect in front of 25,000 people. I really just meant to explain how keeping up with the sheer volume of technologies coming out of Redmond can be overwhelming for everyone and probably accounts for why most developers don’t stray far from the Microsoft stack, but in hindsight that wasn’t how it came across. I quickly sent emails to both Scott and Phil explaining what I really meant and after a good email exchange with both of them, I offered to buy them a beer at the upcoming Alt.Net conference in Seattle next month to make up for my stupidity.

2.5 One Degree of Twitter Separation – A link to the post gets twitterized by blogging superstar Jeff Atwood, thus almost…almost…making up for all the time I had to spend slogging through the comments.

2.6 Godwin’s Law Prevails – Somewhere around the 150th comment, I noticed that someone has actually made a Hitler analogy thus conclusively proving Godwin’s Law that “as online discussions grow larger, the probability of a comparison Nazis or Hitler approaches one”. I officially become disillusioned with the Flame War and seriously consider closing the comments on it. It seems like a lame thing to do, so I decide against it.

3. War Crimes

3.1 Flame Warriors Behaving Badly – Although they were in the minority, the usual number of troglodytes, evil clowns, artful dodgers, and blowhards showed up for the fun as you can see from the following quotes:

“Your analogy only partially works because while it’s true .net developers and Americans are hated in their respective communities, you don’t have a choice if you are born in America but *choosing* the .net platform is your own pathetic fault and just shows those that choose .net have no personal integrity or even care about the future of the industry as a whole.”

“Let me start with a little ad hominem – you are an idiot…”

“BTW, .NET is just a joke. As someone said, it is a way (not great) for newbies to start learning how to write software. I would say go with Turbo Pascal for a start and then keep away from MS as long as possible.”

“Visiting PHP is like visiting Sub-Saharan Africa. Really makes you appreciate what you have.”

“all code is the same, different syntax, different purposes. Shut the f**k up already. You nerdy b**ches.”

“I’m CTO of an start up. One of our hiring practices is to ignore any resumes that mention ASP or .NET.”

“Have you guys heard that Bill G is a fag???”

“If .NET developers are tourists from the United States”…then “Open source developers are the French.”

4. Aftermath

4.1 Surprisingly Positive Experience - Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the debate and professional demeanor of the majority of participants. Like I said, many people spent more time and effort composing the comments than I did writing the post in the first place. I am still in the process of taking ample notes on the various arguments and suggestions. They should provide thought provoking material for future posts for quite some time.

In summary, it was fun…but let’s not do it again any time soon.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Musings, Rants none

#1 | Written by Reg Braithwaite about 4 years ago.

Very nice summary, well done!
#2 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Reg – Thank you! It took me a few iterations before I settled on this approach. At first I tried providing some summary analysis of the different arguments, but that was simply too immense of a task. Finally I settled on just writing about what it was like from my perspective.

Thanks again for the link love. I was actually originally going to contribute 4.00 to your paypal account so you could try my favorite afternoon coffee drink (grande, triple shot, non-fat lattee), but it was fixed at the price of your usual (simple black is also a good choice).

I love that you chose that route instead of advertising to fund your blogging habit. I might do the same at some point to avoid the annoying clutter of ads.
#3 | Written by she about 4 years ago.

“I got called an idiot a few times, but mostly I was amazed at how the commenters were arguing back and forth with each other rather than targeting me”

Lets be real. Blog authors sometes censor but most often just wont publish critique. If that is the case, writing a blog comment is somewhat a waste of time, so people will try to write “friendlier” than they actually think “what this guy wrote is wrong, he is sooo stupid”
#4 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@She – I didn’t presume that nobody thought I was an idiot just because they didn’t say it. It’s hard to imagine anyone publishing their thoughts without somebody, somewhere thinking they’re an idiot. The world is simply too big and opinions are too diverse.

I was just trying to point out that this was the first time for me personally that the comment section became a dialog between the participants rather than only being directed at me. That was a nice experience.

As far as your assertion that bloggers habitually censor criticism is concerned, I don’t doubt that it happens but I wonder about the actual frequency since I’ve never done it myself or had it done to me.

I tend to think that people who experience this type of censorship are partly to blame. There is a difference between “sucking up” friendliness and “common courtesy” friendliness. I think most bloggers are fine with some pretty harsh criticism as long as it is done with at least a modicum of respect.

If someone left a comment consisting of a string of expletives with no constructive feedback associated to it, then I admit that I would probably be tempted to consider it as simple grafiti and delete it. Is that really wrong?
#5 | Written by Matt about 4 years ago.

@She

I’m the one that referred to Russell as an idiot (for which I later apologized). He did not censor any of my posts.
#6 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Matt

No hard feelings. I wasn’t really all the offended the first time and did notice that you apologized later, which I appreciated. Calling someone an idiot is actually pretty mild in the grand scheme of things.

I was definitely impressed by the level of effort you put into the debate. I’ll try to do some of the arguments and points justice in future posts.
#7 | Written by Meneer R about 4 years ago.

>There is a difference between “sucking up” friendliness and “common courtesy” friendliness.

There were quite a few posts you could have deleted, without most people considering it censorship.

Common courtesy was at times gone; there were some personal attacks, some sweeping generalisations about certain countries.

As you are a history major I am curious what you thought about all the historial lies and facts that were used to prove a point.

Also, for a good example of how ‘censoring’ can keep a discussion somewhat factual and without personal attacks, take a look at slashdot. The default view, which shows only 3% of the posts, comes accross as an intelligent discussion. If you change the view standard to show all the comments its a complete trolling war.

I don’t personally blog, but censoring in such a way people can still choose to view the comments is not censoring; its just forcing people to stay polite.

I eventually stopped commenting exactly because some of the people would go futher and futher with their unfriendlyness and without a censor, be it the blog author, be it the community.
#8 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Meneer – Interesting thoughts on how to distinguish between editing and censoring. It would be nice if WordPress had a feature similar to slashdot that would allow filtering of what the author considers to be trolling comments. That way they would still be available for viewing for those that wanted to see them, but also wouldn’t disrupt the general discourse.

It has been almost 15 years since I was a history major in college. I used to love it, but eventually got burned out and opted for what I felt was a less subjective path (got that one wrong, huh?).

I’d be happy to send you my thoughts on the historical aspects offline if you wanted to provide me your email (mine is rt_ball@yahoo.com), but I’d rather keep this blog focused on technology for now. The analogy about how Americans are viewed abroad really was only secondary to the point I was trying to make in the post.
#9 | Written by Meneer R about 4 years ago.

Also, one of the, what you called ‘flame’ baits, might not have been:

>“I’m CTO of an start up. One of our hiring practices is to ignore any resumes that mention ASP or .NET.”

Although I doubt a CTO spends time trolling on blog postings. This is likely true.

I actually work for an IT job company. (we find it part-time jobs for students and charge by the hour).

Java/.NET mean little to nothing on a student’s resume. Off course when they are more specific about which frameworks and libraries that have worked with, this might tell us something about their motivation to learn new things by themselves. Wether or not they can easily train and educate themselves.

For those jobs where the student is supposed to be able to choose the correct tool for the job and not just be a code-monkey, having .net or java on a resume as a prominent and/or preferred development tool is NO-GO. We feed those to the shredder.

We are more likely to sent people with LISP or RoR to a java-job than somebody that only has java experience. Off course, all it-related-courses, here in Holland, include Java, and most include .NET

Only a minority of the jobs we have have do not depend on any part of the unix-ecosystem . Even the .NET job applications all use a linux-server, at the very least for source control.

There are two dominant OS architectures in place. If we have somebody that didn’t bother to learn them both, then we simply assume they don’t bother to learn anything by themselves. More importantly, they don’t have perspective.

It might not be fair, but the technique is having good results: All of our clients are happy and we don’t have to spent a lot of time to determine some one’s capabilities. (which saves a lot of money). Off course we are in the luxury position of having more students to select from than we can place at clients. I’m quite sure we reject a lot of students that were actually good, it was just not easy enough to determine that based on their resume.

We also heavily appriciate hackery. If some one tells us on their resume they wrote games for their mobile phone, wrote replacement firmware for their ipod, wrote a commondore emulator, etc. Then we tend to put them on top of the list. Even when the experience is not relevant. Because it means they are truly interested and think its fun. Those who code, only because of the money, are generally not good at all.

Off course because all the jobs we provide are part-time, the companies don’t want the brain-dead garbage-man mentality. Then want highly responsible pro-active hackers that are always thinking at least two steps ahead.

We could look more at job experience, but most of these students have none or little, and then .net or java really doesn’t mean anything on the resume.
#10 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Meneer – it wasn’t his assertion that made it excessively provocative as much as it was that he offered no context around it like you just did. Without supporting rationale, it simply read that a programmer was somehow irreversibly tainted by any contact with those languages and now untouchable.

For the record, I went to the corporate site that was provided via his email. It had 90′s style under-construction animated gif’s on all the links, which made me think that CTO meant he was the lone employer on a side company that he is thinking of starting in his spare time. The fact that the salary was so low and that it was listed on Craig’s list didn’t help his cause either.
#11 | Written by Steve Cooper about 4 years ago.

I participated heavily in the debate, and I think we got a reasonably good signal-to-noise ratio for something that could easily have been two tribes of monkeys throwing slinging crap. Hell, having Godwin’s invoked as late as comment 150 has got to be pretty good, all things considered.
#12 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Steve – I agree with you and was especially impressed by the thoughtfulness of your comments and how you gave very specific examples to back up your points. I copied several of them down to explore myself and use as the basis for follow-up posts.

Although I singled out a few of the bad ones in the post under the War Crimes section, I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio was pretty high on this debate. Usually I would avoid the comment section of a post that had generated that many comments, but in this case I would recommend to other readers that they take the time to go through it.

Any references I made to “slogging through the comments” had less to do with the quality of them and more to do with the quantity…:-)
#13 | Written by Guillaume Theoret about 4 years ago.

Oh no, I only just trimmed my rss feeds, hacking it down to half the previous number.

The other post was easy to disregard as a one-off 15 minutes of fame good read but now with this one I just subscribed to your feed. Looking forward to your next posts.
#14 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Guillaume – Thank you! That is high praise indeed.

I am constantly fighting the same struggle of ruthlessly trimming my rss feeds only to discover a new blog I like.

The democratization of publishing makes things both exciting and overwhelming. I am constantly wishing that I had more time to read all the good content that I know I am missing on a regular basis.
#15 | Written by Meneer R about 4 years ago.

>The analogy about how Americans are viewed abroad really was only secondary to the point I was trying to make in the post.

Yes. Nevertheless it was not completely correct. The american tourists in Paris I assume are much nicer, than those that visit Amsterdam. (i should know)

Likewise the dutch that visit the states, are generally nice, educated people. Those that go to the costa del sol (the beaches of spain) behave like complete animals. They actually get a fine in advance there. (when they don’t break anything and do not get arrested they get the money back)
#16 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Meneer – I stand corrected on my analogy. Danish tourists really get a fine in advance when they visit the costa del sol? That is hilarious. Perhaps American tourists just need monetary incentive to curb some of their obnoxious behavior as well…:-)
#17 | Written by Meneer R about 4 years ago.

The danish live in Denmark. The dutch live in Holland (aka the Netherlands).

The fine in advance is for one specific town. (Lloret de Mar). One that is extremely popular with our ehm .. what you call trailer-trash in the states. (but we don’t have
trailer parks). Teens (age 15-25) come to drink, sex and fight. They go to dance at disco’s with dutch names. They eat at snackbars with dutch names. They have to pay 150 euro’s on the bus (where they are already getting drunk). Their passports are taking. On the way back, they get their passport back and their money, if they behaved. The rules are explained in the bus, in dutch. They do not see or hear any spanish word during their holiday.

The fire-department keeps the beaches there wet at night, so it isn’t filled with condoms the next morning.

If you would have to base an opinion about us while only meeting those people, you would be suprised our prime minister can even tie his shoes.

Likewise, in Amsterdam, we get a lot of male british tourists. They come with the bus and the boat. They arrive drunk, visit prostitutes and get extremely drunk. If it weren’t for the pot, they would be a problem too. Thankfully those idiots usually get so high they fall asleep on the streets (and get mugged).
#18 | Written by Russell Ball about 4 years ago.

@Meneer – Yikes, that was an embarrassing mistake on my part brought about by trying to answer a comment before I’ve had my second cup of morning coffee…:-)

Great anecdotes! I guess every country has their undesirables. Too bad they like to travel and create stereotypes wherever they go.

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Anatomy of a Flame War

1. Causes

2. Chronology

3. War Crimes

4. Aftermath

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