1) I think an aggressive personality is common in many successful---not the correct word, but it'll do---people. Look at any "team" sport where one player tends to take the spotlight. With the Tour de France on, I can't help but recall all of the prima donnas of Tours gone by. Actually, it's so rare to have a down-to-earth, genuinely thoughtful and nice person rise to the top in that sport that it's always called out when it happens.
2) I think being a jerk online and lack of in-person social skills aren't correlated. For whatever reason, when it's a computer screen in front of you, people tend to be more aggressive about their point of view. Unchecked, that can turn into "jerkiness," but I don't think it's a one to one. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who are jerks online and the same offline. I also know plenty of people who are jerks online and the kind of person you hope passes you on the highway when you've got a flat or run out of gas---it's a given they're stopping and helping in any way they can.
3) I'm a little disturbed by the implication that a stunted career is what motivates people to contribute to open-source software, but I assume it wasn't meant quite that way. This illustrates an interesting point. Given that I don't know the context of where your fourth paragraph is coming from, I'm assuming the best and that you didn't mean it as I took it during my first reading.
That type of small misunderstanding could have resulted in me (or someone else) firing off a quick response calling you out on it, or even less hostilely taking issue with it and trying to rebute it. That in turn could have made you feel more defensive, so your next post might have been preemptively aggressive, and so on. This quickly deteriorates into a cycle where we're making each other more aggressive without meaning to and give rise to this mentality.
Subtly is lost online. It's ashamed, but the way it seems to be.
All that said, I do think those who the community looks up to are the ones that set the tone, for sure. I can point to many a project mailing list that have been rendered useless because some of the biggest (or perceived, historically, or actual) contributors take it over with their overly curt style of responses. :-/
2) I think being a jerk online and lack of in-person social skills aren't correlated. For whatever reason, when it's a computer screen in front of you, people tend to be more aggressive about their point of view. Unchecked, that can turn into "jerkiness," but I don't think it's a one to one. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who are jerks online and the same offline. I also know plenty of people who are jerks online and the kind of person you hope passes you on the highway when you've got a flat or run out of gas---it's a given they're stopping and helping in any way they can.
3) I'm a little disturbed by the implication that a stunted career is what motivates people to contribute to open-source software, but I assume it wasn't meant quite that way. This illustrates an interesting point. Given that I don't know the context of where your fourth paragraph is coming from, I'm assuming the best and that you didn't mean it as I took it during my first reading.
That type of small misunderstanding could have resulted in me (or someone else) firing off a quick response calling you out on it, or even less hostilely taking issue with it and trying to rebute it. That in turn could have made you feel more defensive, so your next post might have been preemptively aggressive, and so on. This quickly deteriorates into a cycle where we're making each other more aggressive without meaning to and give rise to this mentality.
Subtly is lost online. It's ashamed, but the way it seems to be.
All that said, I do think those who the community looks up to are the ones that set the tone, for sure. I can point to many a project mailing list that have been rendered useless because some of the biggest (or perceived, historically, or actual) contributors take it over with their overly curt style of responses. :-/