Alex Hillman shared this over on Twitter, and it’s an excellent read.

This part about the cycle really stuck out.

It’s even harder when the leader of your community is a toxic influencer. (Like in the case of Linus Torvalds)

This is often the cycle: 1 A new person comes in. 2 They notice the abuse. 3 They try to do something. 4 The clique protects the abuser. 5 Everyone else is too tired to support, so they stay silent. 6 The new person, unsupported, retreats. By retreating they either now abandon the community, like all the others that didn’t even try to fix it and just left, or they stay and build their own defense mechanisms to tolerate the behaviour: “I’ll just do my part, and try to ignore that person as much as I can”. It’s unlikely they will join the clique because they recognized the toxicity in the first place.