I'm wondering why you're getting down votes. Maybe someone who down votes could explain?
I'm a freshman when it gets to maintaining an open source project (just started with one, it's on my user page), and am very interested in getting savvy on how to feel or judge things, hence I found your image welcome. I wouldn't know whether it's wrong or right, but I find it welcome as it's strong, i.e. sticks around, my mind will compare it to real-world situations in the future and figure out over time whether it's correct.
I think what the image points out is that you're ultimately doing your own decisions, for your own benefit, and not doing it for anyone else unless you decide so. And I'd think that this is correct: I did believe that open source is something to improve the world, and standing against closed-source software, and hence if I saw that open source software was lacking, it felt wrong, and led me in a couple occasions to give strong statements to open source developers, which I guess were received exactly like the negative, demanding inputs criticized here. So I'm guilty of this myself. So now, while I realize that the other side (the user) wants to be appreciated, too and not doing that will lead to project failure (both of which might be the reason leading to the down votes here), it would be wrong to let that suck out your energy. And the picture of the cowboy primarily needing to survive himself seems fitting.
(PS.: I think what I'm advocating to accept here is more "either you or me are going to survive", and not so much "either you or me are going to die". These are not equivalent if there's a middle ground where there are other outcomes than dying. Anyway, the OP points out even better solutions anyway, too.)
(Edit: thanks for the replies, I've appreciated them all.)
Comments like the grandparent are neither true nor false, but rather self-fulfilling.
If you believe that the open-source world is filled with mean people who will grind you down and the only way to avoid this is to give as good as you get, you will behave in a way that ensures that only people who are mean, aggressive, and tactless will gravitate to you. Nobody wants to work on a project where the lead is looking for the slightest sign of misbehavior to jump on people. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: people who can firmly but patiently & politely establish norms of behavior that attract patient & polite people, while people who believe it's a Wild West where everyone's out to get you establish cultures where it's a Wild West where everyone's out to get everyone else.
Most people would rather work in the former culture than the latter, and so in the interest of not establishing more cultures like the latter, they downvoted the grandparent post.
It is hard to believe that the leader of a project would look for "the slightest sign of misbehavior" to "jump on people".
When you open source a project you do so so other people can work with you and help you with your "baby", so it would make no sense to jump on people at random. Everybody makes mistakes. But you must be prepared to face toxic people, because believe me, you will face them. And in that case, you mustn't put your ass up: you must get rid of them.
I'm responding to these sentences in your original post:
"If you don't have a thick skin, you'll have to grow one, and if you can't grow one, they'll just eat you alive.
Eventually you realise it's either you or them. That's when you've mastered it."
Subsequent comments of yours have been more reasonable, but the text of what you wrote in your original comment certainly implies a combative, us-vs-them mentality.
I read the text of the first comment as a warning to be prepared that the world is full of people who aren't part of the "code of conduct" culture wars, and so it's best to know that assholes may just come down on you.
Taking that comment as a sign of combativeness is definitely a signal of thin skin. Does that count as irony? Probably not.
I must say also that if you need a code of conduct, you are on the wrong track.
A code of conduct shows that you (as a project leader) or your community can't deal with human issues using common sense, so you need a list of guidelines for that. So codes of conduct are better avoided.
Codes of conduct are just an effort to constrain conversation to a known-good state instead of attempting to achieve a state that permits all good conversation at the risk of permitting some bad. It's the equivalent of `-Wall -Werror -Wextra`. Your compiler will then reject some valid programs, but it will also prevent some unfortunate situations.
This is just a trade-off one chooses in running a community, and some people choose one and others the other. It doesn't have to be a Clash of Civilisations debate.
Common sense doesn't scale. That's just a simple, observable fact. Relying upon it is asking for capricious leadership that grows increasingly opaque (and probably less satisfactory) as time passes.
I'm getting downvoted by people who don't like the reality, I guess; I'm just pointing out the truth as I have experienced it myself.
About what you said, most projects, if not all, will be struck by hordes of users asking for all kinds of things, some of them will be reasonable, some of them will not. Never hesitate to say NO to a user, even if he's written a patch already. Never merge things out of pity.
Another important thing: if the project grows large enough, it'll attract collaborators that, despite their best intentions, screw up often. Obviously you must be friendly towards them, but be sure to make it clear when they've screwed up.
You will also find collaborators that not only screw up often, but also defend themselves and think they are always right. Do not hesitate to make it clear that that's not the place for such behaviour and if they don't improve kick them out, outrightly or in a subtle way.
It sounds like you are trying to give honest, pragmatic advice, in which case your downvotes are unfair. However, usually when people give that particular advice what they're really saying is that the bad behavior from other people is OK and that the person who feels bad because of it just needs to lighten up.
It's sort of like when someone says, "99% of humanity is too sensitive!" The ONLY people who say that are people who go around pissing off other people on a regular basis and it never occurs to them that the problem might be with their own social skills and not 99% of humanity.
So, when someone's response to someone else getting upset over jerks on the Internet is "you should get thicker skin", it's easy to jump to the conclusion that it's coming from a troll rather than someone honestly trying to help a fellow adult. Based on this comment it sounds like you meant it in good faith and were just trying to help the OP out.
> "I'm getting downvoted by people who don't like the reality, I guess; I'm just pointing out the truth as I have experienced it myself."
I don't doubt that this is what you've found to be true, but I agree with how nostrademons put it, it's self-fulfilling.
Open source projects don't have to be adversarial, though some of them certainly are. What sets the projects listed here apart from the more adversarial projects?
> Do not hesitate to make it clear that that's not the place for such behaviour
Perhaps the point (of the cowboy image, perhaps with regards to self reliance) is that you can tell them that you decide, since you started the project and are still its leader, and that since you think the contribution is screwed up, you won't merge it. This explanation does not contain anything about the contributor's behaviour. Well I guess I don't know about what that part of your example entailed :)
I didn't downvote your parent, but I suspect the downvotes are for the apparent assumption that negativity is natural and inevitable, and the right thing to do is to give in to the system yourself. Many people believe this is the wrong approach, and that a better approach is to find or build better communities.
PS. I think there's also another aspect that made me like the image: the dying per se. A lot of open source projects are simply going to die, aren't they, and you don't want that as the author/maintainer, it's a part of your life after all. So the question very much becomes, it's either that project is going to die (with that part of me) or I'm going to protect it.
Users who don't have experience leading projects may not realize that this dying happens, they may only ever see surviving projects.
Now of course a surviving project that is also friendly is the best, no doubt about that, but the question how to achieve this is going to be partially independent. (The cowboy image may be more fitting for the fact that some projects die, and less fitting for how you achieve for it not to die.)
I'm a freshman when it gets to maintaining an open source project (just started with one, it's on my user page), and am very interested in getting savvy on how to feel or judge things, hence I found your image welcome. I wouldn't know whether it's wrong or right, but I find it welcome as it's strong, i.e. sticks around, my mind will compare it to real-world situations in the future and figure out over time whether it's correct.
I think what the image points out is that you're ultimately doing your own decisions, for your own benefit, and not doing it for anyone else unless you decide so. And I'd think that this is correct: I did believe that open source is something to improve the world, and standing against closed-source software, and hence if I saw that open source software was lacking, it felt wrong, and led me in a couple occasions to give strong statements to open source developers, which I guess were received exactly like the negative, demanding inputs criticized here. So I'm guilty of this myself. So now, while I realize that the other side (the user) wants to be appreciated, too and not doing that will lead to project failure (both of which might be the reason leading to the down votes here), it would be wrong to let that suck out your energy. And the picture of the cowboy primarily needing to survive himself seems fitting.
(PS.: I think what I'm advocating to accept here is more "either you or me are going to survive", and not so much "either you or me are going to die". These are not equivalent if there's a middle ground where there are other outcomes than dying. Anyway, the OP points out even better solutions anyway, too.)
(Edit: thanks for the replies, I've appreciated them all.)