HackerTube.dev

Assholes are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk).

Tom Raftery · 5.7K views · 2012-02-20 · 18:03

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.

On Hacker News

Cited as the go-to evidence that rudeness drives contributors away and that toxic people must be removed from projects.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2023

Topics

Software practice, open source & careersManagement, leadership & organizations
Search by tags
open sourcecommunity managementtoxic contributorsmaintainersculture

What people said

Modified3019 · 2023-09 · Recommendation

Good call. A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
justincormack · 2014-02 · Recommendation

The glibc team are great people to work with; I managed to get a patch into this release which had been point blank refused by Ulrich Drepper when he was maintainer, and they were incredibly helpful and the process was really easy. So get your fixes in - glibc is becoming much more standards compliant. Assholes will ruin your project[1], you need to get rid of them, whether it is open source or not. [1] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
Beltalowda · 2023-01 · Reference

> I've noticed that claims like this are never backed by any evidence of this improvement, or evidence of people who actually have been chased away by rudeness. I am one of them. I've seen other people claim the same. I did not keep a list, nor did I keep a list of all of his posts that I found egregious, and I don't really feel like spending a lot of time crawling through all posts to find them, so I guess this is all I have. It's hard to get "hard evidence" for these kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"[1] from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and other projects. I'm not sure if it's easy to get these kind of numbers from e.g. Slack or Reddit though. [1]: [LINK] / [VIDEO] > total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously. It wasn't the first time he was banned, but I'm not privy to the exact details on this. Was total "total exile" proportional? I don't know: obviously I didn't see everything. I just wanted to say he didn't "just" get banned over a minor thing, but after many years of problematic behaviour that had been raised plenty of times.

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Tom Raftery, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources