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Reactgate Recap

Aryan J on August 25, 2019

Series of Events A take on Vue developers vs. React developers is tweeted. // Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElement...
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Ben Halpern • Edited

This has been a frustrating situation in a few ways with many people shouting past one another. I hope we can come together as a community.

There were valid concerns at play here, as well as some unhealthy tribalism. Our industry needs to get better at making minoritized groups feel safe and heard, while also improving constructive communication as a whole.

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Niko Heikkilä

Typical Twitter. Not regretting the decision to leave the service a month ago. Relying on Mastodon, DEV, and RSS feeds for keeping myself in the tech loop has done amazing things on my mental health and cut my staring at phone to less than half.

Can only recommend the same for Dan and the rest of the community.

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Ben Halpern

I think it's pretty clear that Twitter is terrible for the mental health of its users, and the collective mental health of the software community.

It's addictive and enables limited-context arguments, like this one.

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Ravavyr

I'd say that stands for all social media. At the same time, they're also not going away anytime soon because they feed people's ego so damn much. And people love those little bursts of "feel good" hormones.

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Pedro Santana

Dopamine*

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Victor Perez

Man I really wish I could escape this twitter drama, didn't want to see it on dev.to

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Ashlee (she/her)

Please don't minimize this to drama.

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Victor Perez

When I say drama I’m specifically referring to the ken/heydon/dan situation that this post is addressing, not the wider situation as a whole.

I am however very for the conversations that this situation has spawned about white supremacy/toxicity/etc in tech, as I’ve dealt with a lot of it firsthand.

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Samuel

It is in fact drama. You don't have to be scared of saying the truth.

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Ashlee (she/her)

This whole thing is bigger than some silly drama. People have been hurt and are continuing to be hurt.

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Samuel

I am not denying the fact that drama is capable of hurting people's feelings. It however is still drama. Or probably I don't understand what "This whole thing" means but this particular Twitter ish is plain drama.

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Eli Bierman • Edited

Update: You can read Tatiana's factual account of what went down and draw your own conclusions.

I think number 0. was a hand sign at a conference that is sometimes meant to mean "white power." The Southern Poverty Law Center has a pretty in-depth explanation of the symbol:

... what it’s about most of the time is a deliberate attempt to “trigger liberals” into overreacting to a gesture so widely used that virtually anyone has plausible deniability built into their use of it in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that there are white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen who have increasingly begun using the use of the symbol both to signal their presence to the like-minded, as well as to identify potentially sympathetic recruits among young trolling artists flashing it. To them, the configuration means WP, for “white power.”

This use of the signal preceded the 4chan hoax that made it go viral. A number of alt-right figures, notably white-nationalist guru Richard Spencer, published photographs of themselves using the symbol as early as 2016. Milo Yiannopoulos adopted the symbol on social media as early as 2015.

Using white power symbols or other forms of hate speech should have no place in the tech community. Unfortunately many people are comfortable with these hate symbols because they don't understand the destructive impact they can have on people. Even if the intent of this symbol was just a joke about the "circle game" like Ken said in his talk, it is still a symbol of hate and it is psychologically damaging to people regardless of what his intent was.

One impact in this case is an incredibly talented designer and speaker (Tatiana) leaving the tech community. I encourage you to read Radhika's perspective on the saga. I think she summed it up perfectly: "This isn't about Ken. This is about supposed allies, folks taking the neutral route, the infinite amount of gaslighting."

Another gem from Radhika's thread:

You can't claim that we brought politics into your pure world of React.

My life is political.

My tech career almost ended because my life is political.

Your life & tech career are political, too. You just don't see it.

This. Is. Technical.

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christine

Thank you for adding this, I am not sure if this article is the full story and can be misleading. This is a pretty narrow scope of the full issue that was going on. aryanjnyc, please think about updating this post with further information.

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Aryan J • Edited

I'm listening. Which further information?

Edit: Added Tatiana's account to timeline.

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christine

I think the title might need a tweek too, unless that was all you wanted to focus on. Maybe something a bit more neutral? The event seemed to be the React twitter community as a whole losing a lot of dignity and alienating people. Which caused several account deactivations and then reactivations, as well as causing a lot of irl financial and emotional damage to Tatiana. Thank you for adding the additional information and link to Tatiana Mac's summary of events.

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Aryan J

🙏

Thanks for the suggestions.

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Robin J Bloomfield

It should also be pointed out the Tatiana Mac is quitting the industry because of this mess: twitter.com/TatianaTMac/status/116...

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Theofanis Despoudis

Remind me again, why do we use Twitter? If it hosts emetic comments that ruin your day when you read them, then it's time to take a break from this nonsense.

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Erica

Thank you for the summary. I saw some of the fall out but it was hard to piece together exactly what happened.

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Barfyismydogsname

Code Hipsters always end up devouring their own.

-signed
A Humble COBOL programmer

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Marcin Piekarski

Thanks for the summary Aryan.

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Luis Miguel Delgado

You americans really need to calm down. Take a step back and stop reacting emotionally to everything. The whole white power ok hand sign was a prank that was played on you by 4chan, and you just took it hook line and sinker because you've lost the ability to view anything in the political realm under any objective (or even sane) light. You just keep feeding this tribalism over inane things, just calm down.

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Dalmo Mendonça

Sounds like two good frameworks to work with...

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Sung M. Kim

Thanks for following up.