On Being a Bastard (Cultivating online communities)
shadowcat.co.uk
shadowcat.co.uk
What is important is that everyone who witnesses the policeman deliver a lecture to delinquent teens, the sergeant chew out a new recruit, the moderator remove a troll or flamebait, or the loud mouth deliver an invective laced screed to the newbie who just doesn't get it, gets the message that "certain behaviours aren't tolerated here" and by extension, other (more polite) behaviours are.
When the policeman gives you the nod on the street corner on your way to work, when the sergeant says, "Nice work", when the moderator uses something you wrote as an example of what a good post looks like, or when the community loudmouth bastard says "SHUT UP AND PAY ATTENTION TO HIM" and you realize he's talking about you - that's the point when you realize you're part of the community.
So I can't claim my approach is right, only that it works and that in the absence of somebody finding a better one I'll continue to follow it - and I'm reasonably comfortable that in this case the ends -do- justify the means, at least according to my own moral calculus.
(My reaction upon being yelled at would be to leave, but this is not the behavior I observe in other people. mst has quite a few fans that started off as "victims" of the techniques he describes in the artice.)
To be fair, though, you can only have so many msts in a community. When the other people are nice, a dialog like:
newbie: I'm dumb and can't read, do my work for me
mst: PASTE YOUR CODE IDIOT!!
nicer_person: newbie: good idea... although to be fair, there isn't much to read on this subject
newbie: I'm trying to parse out the td tags in this HTML and I can't get the regexp right
expert: Please don't parse HTML with regexps - try HTML::TableExtract.
newbie: my regexp is /<td>(.*)</ but it doesn't work
mst: newbie: You can't use regexps to parse HTML. Look at this module: ... Now we've answered you twice. If you ask again, you'll be muted for a few minutes.
Continued persistence on the part of the newbie should be met the same way you would in real life. Tell him if he keeps bothering you, you'll uninvite him from your club, and then follow through. The community's purpose is not to educate outsiders who don't wish to receive an education, but for the enrichment of people who will participate as equals. Establishing a norm of unpleasantness, even on the periphery, for the sake of a dubious chance at helping out is not a tradeoff I'd make.
newbie: WTF. But I just wanted help with my regexp! Quit being a nazi! You have no right to ban me I'm just trying to ask a question!
or them quitting immediately. Or at least, it has usually been one of the two in my experience. But I'm not going to claim that means the technique doesn't work; just that it hasn't, for me, so far. I should probably experiment more with it but I suspect it will, oddly, come across far more heavy handed than a bout of profanity.
Well, no, a lot of the time it does work, and I never say a word or I'm the one doing the explaining.
The point of the example is that there's a fairly common pattern where people don't listen, don't become enlightened, and don't stop asking the same question because they've managed to get tunnel vision through staring at their non-working code for too long.
At which point a short sharp verbal slap upside the head often serves to dislodge the cobwebs, at which point they start thinking again, read the explanation properly and become enlightened.
A better way would look something like this:
Grasshopper: I'm trying to parse out the td tags in this HTML and I can't get the regexp right
Master: HTML allows many variations. Making a regex to handle all possibilities is too hard.
Master: Instead use HTML::TableExtract. You can learn to use it faster than you fix all the tricky problems in a regex.
However, your point that the example sucks is good; I've fleshed it out somewhat (and still consider it representative of what I'm attempting to describe)
Still, why do so many seekers-of-wisdom do that? Is it fear of the documentation, which can be pretty intimidating for a novice? Are they truly, seriously lazy gold brickers? Are they just thick? If it is the first, what they need is reassurance and a very simple, unintimidating example.
I wonder if there is a market for teaching chatbots? They'd have a hard time being worse than the endless "tutorials" on the web.
In a lot of cases, as I note elsethread, I think it's often that they've been locked into tunnel vision over the "solution" they're currently attempting - they have a serious case of XY problem but their self-made blinkers prevent them seeing that.
A much shorter version of this drama gets played out on technical channels when one of us goes "hmm, why isn't this working?", somebody else goes "wtf are you doing that for?" and the first one goes ".... oh, FFS, because I'm an idiot". But it takes practice to be that in tune with your inner idiot.
Look at airline loyalty programs, for example. Ask a once-a-year traveler how much he likes "Foo Airlines", then ask someone who travels 100,000 miles a year on Foo Airlines. The person who travels 100,000 miles a year will like Foo Airlines a lot more than the once-a-year traveler because Foo Airlines rewards his loyalty with lots of free stuff that "normal users" don't get.
I don't see why the people involved in the open-source community would be any different.
But in all seriousness, mst is a great developer and community leader, I only know this because I love Perl and always note CPAN authors and contributors of the modules I use. I was (am on occasion) one of mst's victims :) and I can say that when I was a newbie, if my skin wasn't thick, I would have been discouraged by him. Now I suppose Im a fan. That said, I wish we as a community could better cultivate the new and direct them to community projects they can help with. .... I suppose that might entail some stroking.