Yesterday I wrote a blog post about sexism. In the blog post I expressed a few of the ideas I've about this matter, as a private citizen in his blog should be able to do.

The blog post, and my tweets about this subject, received an extreme reaction including tons of rage and insults. Somebody will say, welcome, you understand at 35 that there are people that it is not worth having an exchange with? Not at all, I'm not very positive about humanity in general, but even it the worst mailing list thread, or in the hottest flame war on usenet, I never have never seen what I saw yesterday.

Basically 140 chars are a perfect fit for just rage without arguments. In general the non linearity of Twitter made it impossible to have any kind of discussion that made sense even with the sane part of the people involved in the discussion. That's not ok for me, for a number of reasons.

The first is that I believe that the hacking culture is not like that, it is a culture that was traditionally able to deal with different and extreme point of views. In the last months what I saw instead was Linus Torwalds attacked in a brutal way for criticising a github feature, and RMS put into ridicule for his ideas on Steve Jobs. In both the circumstances I publicly stated I was extremely shocked with what was happening... really, not everybody that can write 2 lines of javascript is supposed to insult RMS or Linus in my opinion.

While I'm not even remotely comparable to Linus or RMS, I'm still an individual that deservers respect for his ideas.

I also love open source, and guess what? It's not a license. It's a process of exchanging ideas, code, and information, freely. In short, I don't want to be part of what I saw yesterday, ever. For me open source is a lot more than a job. For me the ability to express my ideas is more important than smiling to the community and accept the new rules I'm seeing in place.

As you guess, not everybody reacted like that. Actually most of my 10000+ followers either said nothing or encouraged me by private email or direct messages. Thank you, I don't want to claim that everybody is like what I saw yesterday. However among the people that over reacted there were also well known figures of the programming community.

So what happens now? That I'm done with Twitter. I'm going to close my accounts, and I'll use only the @redisfeed account to provide information to the Redis users about what happens about Redis. Releases, critical bugs, anticipations. It will be low traffic, and should be make more people able to be subscribed to that account.

I'll still write about everything I do about Redis and about anything else I like or think and I want to share with the world, here in my blog. I'll modify the blog code in the next days to make it better for short posts, that will be presented as short messages with a date directly in the front page. I'll study a bit what is the best solution to have an easy to follow blog about development, with small continuous updates and bigger posts from time to time.

I'll close the comments on my blog every time I post about things I want other people to reply just with another blog post, not with some rage put within comments.

Please consider that this decision is not based solely on what happened yesterday: this allowed me to reflect on the value and the level of discussion I had on Twitter in three years. I think I can stay more focused on my work, that is to hack on Redis, if I stay away from tweets, as I decided to stay away from IRC some time ago, and as I don't want to have phone calls. It is the logical next step for me.

Note: the problem is not Twitter itself. Some cultural shifting is happening inside the community lately in my opinion.

Btw I'll be more active in the Redis Google Group, and here on my blog of course, you'll probably end reading a lot more about me, but instead of sometimes hard to understand 140 chars tweets, I hope to write in a more clear and extensive form about Redis and what I'm doing.

Thanks to everybody that supported my work so far, I want to share my work with you, as I enjoy the work that other people are doing for me.

See you here in the next weeks!