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So the DerbyCon drama is the continual insistence that conferences be responsible for things they cannot possibly be responsible for, to solve problems that society has not solved, and to abuse the organizers when they don't agree with your Righteous beliefs on these issues.
The old principle was that reasonable people can disagree, and that just because you disagree with them, they aren't evil subhumans. We saw the opposite principle with DerbyCon, where the organizers were attacked as evil for merely reasonable disagreements.
The old principle was that we need empathy, to put ourselves in their shoes, to try to see things from their perspective. The new principle on social media is that they are wrong and evil and therefore I don't need to have empathy for them or understand their perspective.
The problems conference organizers face have such obvious solutions! They don't agree with my solutions, so it must obviously be because they are evil and stupid, and not because they have a broader list of concerns and more knowledge of the issues.
I'm a jerk who courts abuse on social media, from both sides, but I can do that because I don't care. Putting on a conference means caring a lot, putting heart and soul into it, so the abuse heaped upon organizers by the social media generation really hurts.
We are avoiding the underlying disagreements DerbyCon had over the past couple years. That's because (1) they are still highly contentious, and (2) not the issue. The issue at stake is that people care a lot about the disagreements, but are evenly divided on it.
