Remedying toxic behavior

Toxic behavior can take several forms. It can be what is called flaming, which refers to individuals going back and forth attacking one another with those lower-brain responses we spoke about earlier in this chapter. It can also showcase itself with people disconnecting or becoming disengaged, or just people having short or trite responses in conversations. Both are highly disruptive, holding a community back and causing stress and friction.

Often, this comes down to communication issues, where there need to be collaborative and constructive conversations, like what Amy achieved in the examples previously in this chapter. Let’s look at another fictional example of such an exchange; here, we have Ray as the contributor and Sam as the maintainer:

Ray: I keep looking at this pull request to refactor some of the tests, and I’m not sure I understand it.

Sam: What’s not to understand? It’s simple tests.

Ray: Well, not all of...