Disassembling Impostor Syndrome

This is my talk from Handmade Seattle. It ties into moderation policy and community design.

Q&A:

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Nice talk.

I’m very much a flighter, but I’ve seen some fighters too over the years. Never fun to interact with one…

It’s important for a community (be it in person or online) to foster psychological safety. Always remember that – with the right tone and language – it should be perfectly fine to attack ideas, but never to attack people. Nobody should feel so unwelcome and scrutinized as to shy away from the discussion or leave the community altogether.

In short: it’s incredible how much of online community moderation could be reduced to “don’t be a jerk” :upside_down_face:

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Could you please, in general, provide links to the videos that are accessible in a straightforward manner (without having to look at the page source :slight_smile: )? I usually download them with yt-dlp and watch later, maybe offline. Thanks!

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Very interesting discussion! I love your work Kristoff.

I do think you come down way too heavy on the fighters though. In my experience fighters are needed to create engagement and a community with zero fighters can easily stagnate and die. The implication that flighters are potentially more productive or useful to a community is not true. We really need both, and we them to balance each other out and pull each other into the center.

That being said, toxic behaviour is toxic behaviour and deserves to be baned. Everyone is very capable of toxic behaviour though. It doesn’t make much difference in my experience if it is aggressive or passive-aggressive, the result is the same.

IMHO it’s all a balancing act. Having a set of “passionate” contributors is good, just as long as they don’t push away people who don’t feel comfortable (yet) in participating to the discussion, especially if it happens in a public forum. At the same time, there shouldn’t be so much tone policing as to create a chilling effect on the discourse which prevents opinions from being expressed.

I don’t use yt-dlp but I think the trick there would be to look at the embedded video widget, hover on the video title therein, right click → copy URL, and then feed that URL to yt-dlp – this works without having to use the developer tools in your browser or having to open the video in a dedicated tab :smile:

Sorry it’s the forum software that likes to swap out basic links for embeds whenever it recognizes the source. I’ll make sure to add double links next time.

Thank you!

What I define as flight or flight are two defense mechanisms (ie not entirely voluntary behavior) that people employ to compensate for their insecurities. Neither behavior is desirable in a community, and in my view there is no direct correlation with being passionate or a decision maker. The Zig core team is full of people who have both those traits (passionate, decision maker) and none of them is a fighter.

Excellent hint, thanks @jmc !

Thank you @kristoff !