muckrights-sans-merde

 bonum fabula frat



tips for muckrights contributors



other pages:
roys-ongoing-bs.html

*originally posted:* jan 2021
*updated:* aug 2021


important preface (mar 2021)


while these guidelines may help (far better than nothing) they are no longer considered sufficient.


1. praise is fickle; ignore it completely, just say "thanks" or whatever


i always thought when we worked on things it would feel like community.

communities arent the perfect things that some communities want you to think they are; they have spats and quarrels and what we used to call flamewars, but you probably cant even say "flamewar" at this point due to some codes of censorship ("conduct").

if you do things roy likes, you will be led to believe you part of the community. "fresh meat" is probably more realistic. you will receive gratitude at first.


2. dont be fooled-- you have no real status


roy writes the bulk of the articles. other people may write articles too, but only occasionally. others do infrastructure. roy talks about his boss, but hes probably talking about his day job.

the point is really that you have to define what the muckrights community is in order to say whether you were ever part of it, because at a certain point roy my tell you that youre "practically part of the family now" and 6 months later he could be implying to key people in the free software movement that you were more of a passerby (or troll). its that old history-rewriting thing that is oh so important to creating a narrative.

so if you are part of the "community" there is the irc channel which is the main "place" people know each other, and there are readers and commenters who seem to be part of the community, but whatever.

the point is that if you walk out the door after what roy insists is a "misunderstanding", after that point anything goes. dont take praise too seriously-- its only meant to get you to do more. thats my take on the difference between what was said then and what was said now.

"family"-- even used casually and with modifiers, certainly wont sell you out just to get a bigger story. if it is family, its the dysfunctional kind.


3. due to the above, do not give any personal information out-- not even a personal email address


use an address that is solely for the purpose of dealing with muckrights.

roy would be happy to get leaks whether you use your company email or not. i think he has made real efforts to protect sources, but sometimes this is subject to carelessness or a whim.

at one point i had a lot of cleaning up to do after a mess he made screwing around with my private information, which i never told him about because there is NO PRIVATE CHANNEL to talk to him on. and theres a pretty good story as to why-- he wants to be "transparent" but that means if theres a misunderstanding and you think hes being a shit, you cant really say this anywhere that isnt going to get dragged into chat, into logs, into articles (or more recently, one of the new videos).

this seems reasonable initially, but it is not conducive to resolving misunderstandings, and now that there are actual (no shadow of doubt) lies and smears, i dont suppose misunderstandings are ever MEANT to be resolved:

"This wasn't the first flippant response of this kind." roy is certainly proving now that my feelings of doubt were not a misunderstanding.
http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-040121.html

"To me, personally, this really came out of nowhere, and not for the first time. IIRC, the first time was, I argued that a BSD licence would be a regression."
http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-211220.html

here we have the sort of one-sided retelling that I was just talking about. you note that now i was being "flippant", but if you go to the response he's referring to, its from the time i was tired of muckrights and ready to leave over similar nonsense 4 months earlier:

"so it’s come to this?" http://techrights.org/2020/08/21/last-article/

the "flippant" response from me was in response to roy saying in an article: "i had been saying this to figosdev several times, but he never agreed..."

actually, he was completely misrepresenting my position-- which is why i wrote an article to clarify the statement he made in one of his. when i sent roy my article he said this was "a misunderstanding". but now that hes talking about it 4 or 5 months later, it was a "flippant response" from me. he tells one version of the story for bullshiting me, then a different one for bullshitting everybody else.

do not give your reputation OR EVEN your position on a matter to roy to fiddle with, misrepresent and creatively re-tell on a whim.

if you want to share information with muckrights, it COULD help the broader community, but be cautious. do not do it under your name, your handle, do not say where you work, do not tell him what you do on the side-- give him nothing about YOU, because it wont be treated fairly.


4. dont offer to do anything extra


muckrights needs information. as of this writing theyre sharing leaks about intel (rewrite: epo). by all means, if you want to send information to muckrights, go ahead.

dont do more than that. understand that youre only going to be well-treated while you serve a purpose, and after that you wont even be able to leave in peace. this was written as a warning to people in general, it has since been demonstrated (in part) at least once more.

anything you do FOR muckrights is possibly going to be turned around against you, as if you only volunteered as some ruse. the ruse is that muckrights is working WITH you.

i could have done more to gain a lot more trust, but i didnt want to get myself into too much. ive sort of been in that kind of situation before, where the trust ive earned is actually turned around against me, like its my fault.

dont. dont do it. he does have other people in charge of other tasks like i said, but that isnt your problem. dont become one of them-- not officially. do not assist with anything other than information. it is not worth it.


5. ignore requests as well


under the circumstances i had every reason to believe were so, i was asked many times to add to something or do something again, or do something new.

dont.

anything youre asked to do (including information youre asked for) that you dont think of offering for your own purposes, dont offer it.

chances are, you know whats safe to share and what youre not comfortable with. the purpose of praise, of requests, of the feeling that youre being "brought in" to the "community" more than you really are, is all (on a social level) there to make you feel like you can do more!

you can share more information-- it will be handled carefully (maybe not QUITE as carefully as you think or are led to believe, but carefully, sometimes) and not only that, youre doing a great job and helping so much!

thats what youre being told NOW. and maybe in 10 years youll be hearing the same thing-- but you dont know that.

only do what youre comfortable doing-- DO NOT let anybody else make you "more comfortable" and try to get you away from your instincts.

i stuck my neck out on many occasions. i also tried to send some things that i made clear i didnt want my name on. bottom line: you have no control over what roy does with this stuff. sometimes he will do exactly what he says. other times will be a surprise.

i never said this stuff before, because i prefer to confront someone PRIVATELY about these sorts of doubts. but due to the way muckrights works-- thats never possible.

so i throw my hands up and leave in disgust, but im told its "a misunderstanding".

4 months later the "misunderstanding" is me being "flippant" and me leaving is "throwing a tantrum."

it completely negates any right that i have to feel let down, mistreated, disrespected or anything.

i did NOT matter.

you probably wont either. but you can make yourself useful. dont volunteer ANYTHING unless it is YOUR idea to do so. i was just a pawn to be written in, then written out. its not an uncommon sort of experience:
http://wilwheaton.net/2017/12/because-so-many-of-you-asked/

basically, youre being used.


6. every picture tells a story, dont it?


some of the strongest feelings i had that hints were being dropped passive-aggressively (and just saying this could result in years of gaslighting, but yes it really could be in my imagination as well-- sometimes i wondered...) was when roy chose cartoonishly-childish pictures for blog work id already been getting praise for.

usually they were fine, which made it all the more intriguing when they were dramatically different.

i didnt start #deletegithub -- not at all. roy was already all about it. i picked it up and ran like hell, but hey, i was still doing most of this with muckrights, so who cares if i suddenly talk about it all the time?

i researched more than 300 gnu/linux distributions and more than 100 packages (with SOME overlap to be sure, because as i mentioned i wasnt the one whos started this campaign-- im not sure roy was either but he was a champion of it) and after about a week of researching hundreds of packages and writing about all of it, this is the picture at the top of my article:

http://techrights.org/2020/05/17/gnuhub-pt-5/

why a baby / toddler / small child? but then there was this: (another baby pic, this one just crying, still have to find the article)

sometimes i would send in a picture, but i generally gave roy control over that part. he never once asked me to give a picture, and submitting one i had worked hard on resulted in a lot of unnecessary back and forth about me trying to get him to unsquish it (or let me resize the image it to fit the size he had set it to). no matter how much work you do on something, the results can be so unrewarding you sometimes almost get the feeling hes trying to tell you something.


7. never believe in perfection


nobody says that muckrights is perfect, nobody would ever believe it if they did. but some things are too good to be true.

rather than make this about muckrights as a whole, understand that there are many claims made-- about censorship, about protecting privacy, about fairness-- when you get past the hype to the reality of the thing, you cant read that a website that boasts thousands of posts per year has never had to issue a retraction-- and take it seriously.

it doesnt mean theyve never been wrong, it means theyve never been legally forced to retract anything.

but it also means that if a serious mistake is made, you get vegas odds that it will be fixed-- maybe you will luck out, maybe the mistake will go on for as long as muckrights does.

its entirely up to roy, or it appears to be. and there is nowhere you can go to work it out. you might as well try go clean up a misunderstanding with your girlfriend in front of a dozen of her mates.

i like to stay at an arms distance, but i felt muckrights was different. sometimes you should go with your first instinct.

either way this is basically all avoidable, if you simply follow these tips. you dont necessarily have to boycott boycottnovell, you just have to go in and not get fooled by the hype. if you can do that, you can submit your story and get out. why? because if what you have to say is important, it will find lots of people. i mean, i believe it when he told me this or that got 10,000 views, or was in the top 20 posts.

and if its not going to get that many people, why not just host the article yourself?


8. host it yourself, first


one of the things i tried to do (i wasnt asked to) is contribute things to muckrights first-- that way roy at least had the option of saying that was the place to go to find it the fastest.

it was never a requirement and others have hosted their own articles which they shared. one time i wrote an entire book that i felt and even said was redundant (i had already submitted most of it before) but this is about pageviews, and it was a slow week. so we put it up anyway.

and by we, i meant i sent it and said to do whatever with it (i freely license my articles, so in truth he really doesnt even need to ask me for things-- he can literally just take them). this isnt a blank cheque to misrepresent the authors intent, but if that happens at least you put up the original first.

when roy says "I listen, I don't censor, and occasionally I offer space..." that really sounds like im begging someone to "please sir, show someone this wittle blog what i wrote!"

i dont bother publishing anything with someone who doesnt want to. its sort of like the military draft-- ideally, you dont want people fighting for you unless they actually signed up to do it. reserves are better than drafted soldiers. its better to publish and collaborate with people who are sincerely interested.

host it yourself, then when roy tries to act like he suffered your writing to exist on his servers, you can say "whatever, hes the one that asked to republish this".

to be clear: most of the stuff i wrote, i offered. im not saying it was all on request. just that the story i hear now is a lot different than what i was told at the time.

thats "publishers" (really, tech bloggers) for you; whats yours is theirs, and what they dont want (even if they said the same thing) is yours. if you self-host, you can let muckrights mirror it. roy acts just as happy when people do it that way.


https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org