To Kill a Community

Building community is hard, doing these things will destroy it

I wasn’t a reader growing up. By reading, I mean the books assigned in English Literature. It’s fair to say I was more an avid reader of Cliff Notes. If the book was turned into a movie, that was even better. Then I watched a movie that turned me onto books:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

The quote is from one of my favorite books, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a book I cherish for its humanity and exploration into injustice. The fundamental truth of the novel is we really do not understand others in the way we think we do.

How many times have we walked away from an argument or conflict and wished it had gone differently? Often our regret stems from a realization that we misread the situation and did not consider the other person’s perspective. We did not climb inside their skin.

A few months back, a controversy erupted on Stack Overflow. You may not have heard of any of this as the discussion happened on Meta, a site about Stack Overflow.

There have been plenty of flares up on Meta over the years. The majority of visitors to Meta are power users of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange sites. They tend to be vocal in their…