Critiquing someone's actions and choices is a founding principle of open source software, politics, and in general most human culture. "I think it was wrong to delete the GitHub issue because my belief structure XYZ" is acceptable.
Critiquing someone personally based on their technical choices is not acceptable. Reddit allows it, and thus Reddit is unusable as a social platform for positive outcomes. "I think you are a bad person because you deleted a GitHub issue" is NOT OKAY.
That distinction appears to be what led the creator to quit today, because the GitHub issue they deleted (perhaps incorrectly) contained personal attacks that linked their technical choices to their quality of human self (definitely incorrectly). I personally would have chosen to XYZ and I think they'll do so in the future if that comes up in a GitHub issue again — but focusing on that is incorrect here.
The focus needs to be on those who wield personal attacks on others over technical choices, and on rewriting communities to prohibit and evict these participants in all cases where such can be done. Shun them, ban them, and prohibit them.
I agree with your point. Personal criticism should be extremely rare, and very carefully handled. A thread in a public forum is almost never the right place for it.
Critiquing someone's actions and choices is a founding principle of open source software, politics, and in general most human culture. "I think it was wrong to delete the GitHub issue because my belief structure XYZ" is acceptable.
Critiquing someone personally based on their technical choices is not acceptable. Reddit allows it, and thus Reddit is unusable as a social platform for positive outcomes. "I think you are a bad person because you deleted a GitHub issue" is NOT OKAY.
That distinction appears to be what led the creator to quit today, because the GitHub issue they deleted (perhaps incorrectly) contained personal attacks that linked their technical choices to their quality of human self (definitely incorrectly). I personally would have chosen to XYZ and I think they'll do so in the future if that comes up in a GitHub issue again — but focusing on that is incorrect here.
The focus needs to be on those who wield personal attacks on others over technical choices, and on rewriting communities to prohibit and evict these participants in all cases where such can be done. Shun them, ban them, and prohibit them.