Raspberry pi forums "banned" me again - <LOL - facepalmed hard>

[eti]

It seems the rather hypersensitive, antagonistic "staff"  at raspberry pi forums, are, in fact, a set of hired 12 year olds, as they seem unable to face ANY civil discourse or mature discussion, and have VERY thin skin! If we are to take Liz Upton as a prime example, she demonstrates episodes of PUBLICLY belittling people on the official blog (I saw it a month ago, can't find it now/.)

A thoroughly immature bunch, with no ability to face criticism. I made a point that with SO MANY raspberry pi 400's falling apart and having other faults, that they should man up and take responsibility for their hardware faults, as a COMPANY, as it does their public image no good to defer people to vendors.  The response? BANNED. Reason? "Concern trolling"  - that’s their pet phrase, as it happens - any reference to their moderation failings, on Google, finds this phrase mentioned again and again.




I see it has also been a long known problem for pi forums, as is discussed here, at length: https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081

[AntiProtonBoy]

meh

[eti]

meh

Profound 😁

[Nominal Animal]

Bringing up licensing issues and any issues with GPL compliance will also get you banned real quick.

They definitely do not behave like an ordinary or real "foundation"; they behave exactly like the PR department for Broadcom.
(The GPL license is a particularly sore point of Broadcom; they have very hard time understanding and complying with it.  It is therefore no surprise that the Foundation is keen on obfuscating/eliminating any connection to Libre projects like Linux and Debian, and insist on renaming and rebranding the most visible projects they use in their products –– like Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS.)

To be precise, I don't care much, because I do firmly believe everyone is free to behave exactly as they want within the agreed rules of law.
What I dislike, is when people insist the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a foundation and should be treated as one, regardless of their behaviour with respect to the developers of the software projects they use in their commercial product.  I emphatically disagree: because they behave like PR asshats, I call them PR asshats.

(To verify my point, just look at the technical personnel at the Foundation.  The permanent employees never participate in the open source projects their own product is based on.  They use throwaway personnel who get rotated out within a year or so to do that.  It is completely ass-backwards, unless you accept that they consider open source projects poisonous, like Broadcom does, at a fundamental chief officer level.  This is a pattern that in my observation fits best the behaviour of the Foundation.)

[eti]

Bringing up licensing issues and any issues with GPL compliance will also get you banned real quick.

They definitely do not behave like an ordinary or real "foundation"; they behave exactly like the PR department for Broadcom.

To be precise, I don't care much, because I do firmly believe everyone is free to behave exactly as they want within the agreed rules of law.
What I dislike, is when people insist the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a foundation and should be treated as one, regardless of their behaviour with respect to the developers of the software projects they use in their commercial product.  I emphatically disagree: because they behave like PR asshats, I call them PR asshats.

I've been convinced for a while, and by the weird and hyper defensive/angry behaviour of their "staff", that it's entirely possible that this whole raspberry pi charade is a front for something to do with Broadcom ... the whole "let's teach kids to code" is a steaming pile and they know it - the might of the BBC achieved that in collaboration with Acorn, and it was all down to a companion TV series AND THE CPU WAS OPEN TO ALL!! They ain't EVER going to recreate the "bedroom coder" scene, they don't have it in them, they're utter amateurs and have proved it countless times.

I see it AT BEST as them being paid off by Broadcom to shift SoC and/or use the public as silicon beta testers for similar SoC families deployed en masse, elsewhere, or worse... who knows. The whole mega arrogance of their "staff" and their hair trigger to shoot people down, smells awfully of sometime going on that they're never gonna admit to.

I dislike the "foundation" as they're perpetually full of dung.

[eti]

Well whaddaYaKnowwww...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974500

[Nominal Animal]

Yep.  Your words may be a bit stronger than they'd normally be due to the shitheaded ban, but they do describe a truth, in my opinion.

If you were Broadcom, what would be the best PR move to increase the sales of your SoCs, frankly underperforming and buggy compared to the competitors?

Why, set up a nonprofit organization that develops and sells products with Educational theme, buying shittons of those SoCs at low prices that still yield a bit of profit.
To avoid any legal issues, make sure you have a respected educational institute, say University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, as a partner.

In a practical sense, it is a very good move.  It is just a huge pity it was made by as shitty a company as Broadcom is.  Their product is inferior, and their habit of breaking the licenses of open source projects their products rely on is atrocious (just do a search on "Broadcom" and "GPL violation").  The Uptons seem to be good at marketing, considering how easily available their boards are, but that's about it.

Just think what it would be like, if there was a Foundation with leadership that understood how free/open source ecosystems work, and produced Linux SoC computers (from various hardware vendors) as Open Source Hardware.  Maybe had a sub-project, collaborating with various universities, researching on how to enhance IoT security.  Hell, even make sure FreeBSD could be used on appliances, so that we had more than just the Linux kernel to work with.  Bounties on bugs in the most important software components, coordination between projects, and so on.  Stuff like Greg Kroah-Hartmann has done, helping companies push the support of their hardware to upstream vanilla kernels (instead of kernel forks with limited lifespan), making life easier for both users and companies.

Yeah, the pattern is nice, and could open up completely new business opportunities (customized appliances based on FLOSS and OSHW, for example); not to mention how useful it could be to both users and projects.  Remember the PR aspects; what if the principles of GPL and other licenses were taught at high school?  What if the worldwide copyright conventions were simply explained, with the various license schemes, in a single sheet of paper, and taught at school?

Pity the pattern has thus far only been implemented by pretty crappy people –– marketing-oriented, rather than people who could make stuff better.

(And before I get the snide remark, "why don't you do it yourself, if it is so easy, then?", I never wrote it was easy.  Also, I personally am only a burned out husk of a man, and will never ever again go for a leading business role.  I solve problems, that's it.  All I've done here, is describe the patterns of behaviour and business that I see.  I can see that the pattern itself is interesting, and if done by people who understand the FLOSS ecosystems, it might be something really great.)

[eti]

Yep.  Your words may be a bit stronger than they'd normally be due to the shitheaded ban, but they do describe a truth, in my opinion.

If you were Broadcom, what would be the best PR move to increase the sales of your SoCs, frankly underperforming and buggy compared to the competitors?

Why, set up a nonprofit organization that develops and sells products with Educational theme, buying shittons of those SoCs at low prices that still yield a bit of profit.
To avoid any legal issues, make sure you have a respected educational institute, say University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, as a partner.

In a practical sense, it is a very good move.  It is just a huge pity it was made by as shitty a company as Broadcom is.  Their product is inferior, and their habit of breaking the licenses of open source projects their products rely on is atrocious (just do a search on "Broadcom" and "GPL violation").  The Uptons seem to be good at marketing, considering how easily available their boards are, but that's about it.

Just think what it would be like, if there was a Foundation with leadership that understood how free/open source ecosystems work, and produced Linux SoC computers (from various hardware vendors) as Open Source Hardware.  Maybe had a sub-project, collaborating with various universities, researching on how to enhance IoT security.  Hell, even make sure FreeBSD could be used on appliances, so that we had more than just the Linux kernel to work with.  Bounties on bugs in the most important software components, coordination between projects, and so on.  Stuff like Greg Kroah-Hartmann has done, helping companies push the support of their hardware to upstream vanilla kernels (instead of kernel forks with limited lifespan), making life easier for both users and companies.

Yeah, the pattern is nice, and could open up completely new business patterns; not to mention how useful it could be to both users and projects.  Remember the PR aspects; what if the principles of GPL and other licenses were taught at high school?

Pity the pattern has thus far only been implemented by pretty crappy people –– marketing-oriented, rather than people who could make stuff better.

(And before I get the snide remark, "why don't you do it yourself, if it is so easy, then?", I never wrote it was easy.  Also, I personally am only a burned out husk of a man, and will never ever again go for a leading business role.  I solve problems, that's it.  All I've done here, is describe the patterns of behaviour and business that I see.  I can see that the pattern itself is interesting, and if done by people who understand the FLOSS ecosystems, it might be something really great.)

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say, and beyond. I had and have no intention of making unkind snippy remarks to you. I don't like hearing you referring to yourself as "a burned out husk of a man", you are blessed and have a prosperous life, I declare it my friend, and as a Christian I'll keep you in my mind when I pray.

[MrMobodies]

Is yours out of the warranty?

you don't go to Samsung for a replacement TV if yours fails, you go back to the seller.

I know of some sellers have a short warranty and try to put the onus on the manufacturer after a certain amount of time and I think one of them was Ebuyer many years ago.

Don't suppose you have a screenshot of what you posted?

[Nominal Animal]

I had and have no intention of making unkind snippy remarks to you.

Oh no, I didn't mean you would make such remarks!

You see, I was trying to describe how the pattern of the Foundation as a "PR arm" of a company is a potentially positive pattern, and that the complaints against the Raspberry Pi Foundation are a direct consequence of their actions and interactions with others, not an ideological or political thing at all.

However, usually that point is easily misunderstood as "somebody should do the same thing, but with better people", which was definitely not my intent –– because practice beats theory, and finding the right people to do stuff is usually one of the hardest parts of any project or creating an organization.  Yes, that happening would be a good thing, but my point is that the pattern of the Foundation and Broadcom as a company is not inherently bad or evil; it's their leaderships exact behaviour (dictating the attitude across the entire Foundation) that we're complaining about, not the pattern.

So, I was intentionally trying to anticipate the typical mis-argument that derails this kind of discussion by a drive-by poster who doesn't care about the topic but wanted to point out the perceived fallacy in my argument, by stating it myself and explaining why it does not apply.  After all, there is already one "meh" post in this thread, which to me indicates more are likely.

Others who read this thread will have differing opinions (and understanding) of the situation.  I have no interest in changing their opinions, but I do want them to –– if they care –– to see the reasons behind my opinion, and to see more than a single aspect of the situation.  When you, Eti, or I, or anyone else points out the crappy behaviour, the common counterarguments of "who cares" or "but they're a Foundation that does good" or "go do something else", are irrelevant and contribute nothing.
It is like saying "this bun has rodent droppings in it", and someone else countering with "but it is made of whole grain flour, so it's good for you!".

Pointing out my own personal limitations in a brutally honest fashion is intentional on my part.  I know I couldn't run an organization like the Foundation, or a company any more –– I used to, a small joint-stock modestly profitable company doing custom full-stack IT products and educational projects, but utterly broke myself.  The point is, I'm showing I'm being as bluntly honest and direct as I can, and not "paint a picture I'd want others to believe".  The latter is social manipulation I detest.
All my complaints about the Raspberry Pi Foundation deal with how they interact with developers and projects their own products rely on.  Having contributed both mutually beneficially, and having tried to contribute to semi-hostile projects, I do claim I know the patterns that work, and those that do not, when dealing with free/open-source software.  And that is at the core of my complaints.

[magic]

I made a point that with SO MANY raspberry pi 400's falling apart and having other faults, that they should man up and take responsibility for their hardware faults, as a COMPANY, as it does their public image no good to defer people to vendors.  The response? BANNED. Reason? "Concern trolling"  - that’s their pet phrase, as it happens - any reference to their moderation failings, on Google, finds this phrase mentioned again and again.

"We are great, all critics are out to get us". Well, yet another case Elizabeth Holmes mentality
That seems typical of people who spend too much time on the orange forum and actually take it seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974500

Yep, confirmed.

And this

The Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity.

Our director does work for Broadcom

Nice

[amyk]

It's amusing that a lot of people claim the RPi "community" is great.

I guess that's because they're almost all "makers"...

[eti]

It's amusing that a lot of people claim the RPi "community" is great.

I guess that's because they're almost all "makers"...

I am a "maker", I make a mess, I make dinner... et cetera.

[Halcyon]

Is yours out of the warranty?

you don't go to Samsung for a replacement TV if yours fails, you go back to the seller.

I know of some sellers have a short warranty and try to put the onus on the manufacturer after a certain amount of time and I think one of them was Ebuyer many years ago.

Don't suppose you have a screenshot of what you posted?

This would entirely depends on where in the world you are. For example, in Australia, it would be perfectly reasonable for a consumer to go direct to a manufacturer for a warranty issue, in fact, it's a legislated right. Here, the consumer can choose whether to go to the original place of purchase or the manufacturer of the product to claim a remedy. Neither can fob you off to the other, that's illegal. It also applies to companies based overseas who conduct business or sell their products in Australia, they are still bound by Australian Consumer Law. These are consumer rights that cannot be waived away through a contract, terms of sale or any other fine print.

There have been several high profile cases involving some big companies such as Apple who have breached their responsibilities under ACL. It's actually quite a powerful bit of legislation.

[rstofer]

There's an old saying that goes something like:

"Never try to teach a pig to sing!  It wastes your time and annoys the pig..."

Just walk away!  Save on all the aggravation.

[james_s]

The RPi itself is fantastic, I use them for all sorts of things and have had very few problems. The community, I don't know, I've never tried dealing with them, I just buy the hardware, set it up and use it. Doesn't surprise me to hear that the community is useless, let me guess, do they use a Discourse based forum? I found the same thing with the Home Assistant community, the product is great but the community is completely useless, they're not interested in any form of criticism, constructive or not and they'll berate you for daring to do so. "It's free, what do you expect? If you don't like it write your own" seems to be the prevailing attitude. The documentation is complete garbage too, it looks nice on the surface but when you try to actually follow it you realize there is almost no actual information. Even the most basic tasks were a struggle when they don't have to be at all, and the forums are filled with people asking questions and very few answers. I found a handful of youtube videos by unaffiliated home automation enthusiasts to be vastly more useful.

So many forums today are a great illustration of why this forum is so good. The moderators here by and large are not rude, and they do not do what I see so often elsewhere, where a moderator just HAS to get in the last word, say something rude about someone and then lock the thread so they can't respond. I think part of it is inherent to the way Discourse ranks posts and participants, it creates a toxic environment.

[bd139]

Oh I am glad to see this one. I have been banned twice too. What did I report?

Well the first was related to the brown out issues on the original RPi 2 leading to SD corruption. Apparently the issue is entirely me.

Secondly there was the poor power conditioning on the RPi 3 leading to crashes. I had to run the thing off a bench supply which was approximately 100x the volume to get any reliability out of it with a couple of USB devices plugged in.

How dare I complain that I bought a piece of shit and got screwed  .

Decided never to buy any more amateur crap like that when you can get a second hand Lenovo mini PC and an arduino and slave the damn thing off it if you want a proper computer with digital IO.

As mentioned these guys are Broadcom in disguise. I still talk to someone I used to work with years ago. He spent 3 years working at BCM on the SoC stuff, mostly software and suggested to use his words: "I wouldn't let electrons near that crap".

Edit: oh and I could write an essay about BCM ethernet controllers which gave me nearly a fucking decade of misery on HPE stuff arguing back and forth between them, HPE and Cisco over who's fault it was when shit didn't work. It was BCM in the end!

[Halcyon]

Oh well, at least you have the EEVblog forum, where just about anything goes.

This is why I left the Whingepool forums long ago. You get your posts removed there for having a valid opinion, but if it differs with a moderator, you're in trouble.

[eti]

Their whole “cutesy” vibe makes me cringe. Look at all the usual suspect list of “go-to” YouTubers and academic types that you see hovering around pi “community” as a whole (wider than just their forum), it’s almost as if they’re paid shills or given free stuff.

I was given a free pi 400 by a well known supplier, to review, and have used it as my main Desktop for three months (I promised one month for my review), but now I just wanna snap it in half and throw it in the bin - I don’t want to drive any more sales their way tbh, and it’s an utter mess for a daily PC.

Last month their updates broke Bluetooth, which in a system like this is a rather major fault. That’s been at least three weeks now - have they fixed it - what do you think? Their official response on the forum was to ask their  ✌️“community”✌️ to try various versions of a Bluetooth package which caused the issue, and to report back which one worked…

It’s a good thing they only make toys and not actual industrial or military grade equipment, they’d be sued so hard they’d go bust in half an hour.

Wow. Incredulous.


PS: Whoever accepted this icon as the one to go with for the pi ✌️“foundation”✌️must be visually impaired, or lack any design sense at all. The fact that the ruse is that this thing is for children, doesn’t mean that a child couldn’t  have done better 🤣 - it’s HIDEOUS!!!!

[james_s]

Decided never to buy any more amateur crap like that when you can get a second hand Lenovo mini PC and an arduino and slave the damn thing off it if you want a proper computer with digital IO.

How much power does that mini-PC burn? One of the main benefits of the RPi and various similar devices is that it draws only 2-5 watts or so depending on the version. The lowest power mini-PCs I've measured draw around 20W.

[Karel]

I have only experience with the RPI2, RPI3b and the RPI4.
The RPI3 I use every day as a Kodi multimedia center connected to my TV.

I never had a negative experience with them. I used the forums but only in read mode because all
the questions I had were already asked by others and I was able to find the answers and information
I needed, just using DDG.

Also, I never had problems with corrupted filesystems or broken sd-cards. Probably because I always
try to avoid a sudden power interrupt and I always shut down nicely and give the system time to close
the filesystem. (and use a quality sd-card!).
In fact, for the RPI I use for Kodi has a bi-stable relay where one coil is connnected to a gpio pin so that
when I use the remote control (I use a TSOP38238 connected to another gpio pin with LIRC) to switch-off
Kodi, the last cpu instruction will be to toggle that pin connected to the relay and switches off the power.

My first experience with the RPI was at work, when I had to debug and refactor a custom SPI driver for
the TI - ADS1298 development board. Because of timing issues, I couldn't use the kernels' SPI framework
and I had to write a bare metal SPI driver using the registers of the Broadcom chip directly.
I don't remember any particular issues with the documentation.

So, long story short, during all these years I had only positive experiences with the Raspberry Pi's.
Do, I say that they are perfect? Absolutely not. But they do give the best bang for buck and it is my experience
that, by using Debian (Raspbian), the system is rock stable (yeah, you need to use the official 5.1 Volt PSU!).

[bd139]

Decided never to buy any more amateur crap like that when you can get a second hand Lenovo mini PC and an arduino and slave the damn thing off it if you want a proper computer with digital IO.

How much power does that mini-PC burn? One of the main benefits of the RPi and various similar devices is that it draws only 2-5 watts or so depending on the version. The lowest power mini-PCs I've measured draw around 20W.

Lenovo M600 tiny. About 6W idle and 15W under full load. The killer on power was using mechanical disks. There isn’t enough room for one in the M600 as it’s fanless passively cooled so you have to use an M2 SATA disk. This is a massive advantage over the cruddy storage on a Pi.

I had four of them at one point. One as a Kodi media centre, two as a kubernetes cluster and one running my eBay scraper. Eventually I switched to using VMs on my desktop for kubernetes, USB sticks for the TV and running my scraper on Linode though because it was less crap lying around.

[Nominal Animal]

The RPi itself is fantastic

The fact that its hardware sometimes drops USB packets on the floor, even though partially worked around in the software, is a dealbreaker for me.

Although the various Odroids (Amlogic and Samsung SoCs) cost more, at least they don't have unfixable hardware issues papered over in software.

(I bet you've been bitten by that too, but have just considered it a Linux or software bug (often a system crash of some sort), and either ignored it or attributed it to something else than what it is, a hardware bug.  Almost all 'Pi users experience this, and yet behave in this oblivious way.  It angers me, because it blames the innocent for the issues.)

Oh well, at least you have the EEVblog forum, where just about anything goes.

To me, something else is even more important: that the (very few) rules here apply to moderators also, unlike elsewhere.  That makes a damn big difference to me.

"Fairness" is not just a human concept.  It is something very, very deep in the psychology of social apes and monkeys, not just in humans.
Using bans (social exclusion) to control the topics discussed leads to pack mentality, where staying in line is more important than contributing or development.
You see this enforcement model used in several human religious movements, too.

This is why one should not treat the Raspberry Pi forums as a community: because it isn't, it is a pack, or a sect.
You could treat them as a vendor forum, except that because of the Foundation non-profit status, they prefer to pose as in their endless grace providing a favour to their users, instead of treating them as paying customers.

It is friggin' sleazy, if you ask me.

[james_s]

The fact that its hardware sometimes drops USB packets on the floor, even though partially worked around in the software, is a dealbreaker for me.

Although the various Odroids (Amlogic and Samsung SoCs) cost more, at least they don't have unfixable hardware issues papered over in software.

(I bet you've been bitten by that too, but have just considered it a Linux or software bug (often a system crash of some sort), and either ignored it or attributed it to something else than what it is, a hardware bug.  Almost all 'Pi users experience this, and yet behave in this oblivious way.  It angers me, because it blames the innocent for the issues.)

Can't say that I've ever noticed it. Most of my RPis have nothing plugged into the USB, there is one I use as a fileserver/webserver and a few other tasks just sits there and works, about a year ago I finally replaced the original Pi I got way back when they first came out with a model 4 which was a huge performance upgrade. I have a Jupyter Notebook server running on that and it was a bit sluggish on the old Pi but other than that it has been brilliant, I've had uptimes of more than a year a few times. Another Pi is running my Home Assistant automation system, it's another one I don't really think about, it just works. Another is mounted in the housing of a gutted mini settop box and connected to my TV, it runs a Plex client and mostly just works, I've had to reboot it a few times but I don't know if that's the fault of the Pi or something else. Another runs Weewx and interfaces my weather station console to the net. All of these things pretty much just work, I'm not saying your problems are not real, but they are not problems that have impacted me.

Oh I did have one SD card fail on the original Pi server, it died after about 5 years. I don't know whether the SD card failed or if it just got corrupted, it was not on a UPS at the time so it would occasionally get rebooted by a power glitch or in one case the power adapter failed. The rest are all running on the original SD cards I put in when I set them up. I do try to buy high quality SD cards though, not random counterfeit junk.

[Nominal Animal]

Another [Pi] is mounted in the housing of a gutted mini settop box and connected to my TV, it runs a Plex client and mostly just works, I've had to reboot it a few times but I don't know if that's the fault of the Pi or something else.

That's exactly my point: you don't know.  Most users, if you go by what you see on the web, assume it's a Linux bug.  Usually it isn't, exactly because most of the peripherals on the Pi core are connected via USB in the first place.  The nature of USB bus is such that packets are not supposed to be lost (or rather, acknowledged as received but dropped on the floor anyway), and some drivers just cannot recover gracefully from such losses.  The common end result is a completely locked up kernel, requiring a power reset.

It irks me, because it diverts blame to those who are not to blame.

You describe failures that would be unacceptable to me, yet you describe your Pi experience as "fantastic".  I wonder what words you'd use if you were using actual known working hardware, whose support is in upstream vanilla kernels?  (Most people tend to completely forget about it: when something works perfectly, it becomes invisible.  I've maintained servers whose users completely forgot they existed, even though accessing them daily.)

So, I'm not sore about Pi –– it is what it is, and even I have some due to the price point and camera module availability ––, but about how their users don't know nor care if the issues they live with are due to hardware or software.

How do you feel when your inane coworkers failures are routinely attributed to the entire team?  Not very happy, I'd imagine.  In this case, the stink follows everywhere, and switching jobs won't change anything.