It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well.
Discourse used to be a thing.
Discourse used to be a thing.
That person was Linus.
I've found my share of trolls and assholes, but likewise I've found that being forthright, polite and respectful tends to yield answers.
Imagine a term like "RTFM" being coined and used in popular tech formus today. Back in the days "RTFM" was a valid one-word response to any number of questions by a n00b; if said question was in an IRC channel you'd often get kicked or even kick-banned for good measure.
or "flamewar", which almost sounds a bit anachronistic now. I don't think I've been in one in a long time actually. The early 2000s were a lot rougher and often toxic compared to what you have today.
Internet discourse is still hit and miss but it's more mature.
Strongly agree. It used to be the accepted norm that you’d ban relentlessly evade to get back at the admin who flamed you in their ban message. However, there was the tacit understanding that it was the internet and none of it was real: just log off and go outside once you got sick of it.
Now that i've spent time answering support questions on a forum for an open source project i'm involved with...
I still think rtfm is rude and wouldn't say it, but i 100% understand why people would want to say it.
On one hand, I see so many occasions where someone typically new to something even if they aren’t new to programming asking questions that could be trivial found in a second.
On the other hand I’ve seen enough handwavy RTFM copypastas from people who clearly neglected to read the question being asked as well as enough manuals [documentation, etc.] that wants to make me bash my head in with how usuals, unspecific, difficult to navigate it is.
I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.
As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.
Edit: I feel like I should point out that I agree that RTFM is an incredibly offensive term, but some form of answer like: “it is covered in the documentation” actually conveys one important bit of information: The answer can actually be found in the documentation.
A direct link to the documentation section they should use is the minimal reasonable answer, in my opinion.
Ie, "I looked in the docs and couldn't find how to..."
When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
* vague
* no code example
* pretty basic that a google search could answer your question
* same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over
Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile).
If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different.
I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
I posted an answer to a question like 10 years ago before dynamic or anonymous types existed in .NET. It was valid and I later prefixed it to say another answer is now correct but mine was correct for the version of .NET in question.
Still has people downvoting today.
It really sucks answering questions and investing time when people downvote for silly stupid reasons.
I’ve also seen questions asked which were good questions with examples and such. But downvoted because “that’s now how you do it” despite “I can’t do it that way because of constraints in the system”
Part of SO is really good! It’s been a game changer. But it’s really a different community now than when it started. I miss the early days.
> Still has people downvoting today.
Aye that sucks. I have a PHP answer that is the accepted answer, but the PHP wonks got all up in arms about it because the immediate solution for the OP was to use the global keyword in their class method to get access to an array that's being created/modified in the global scope. I did caveat by letting them know this isn't a fantastic solution. But it looks like their app had a shedload of bigger problems that weren't going to be solved in my answer.
I also miss the early days.
Apropos my previous reply, I wasn't having a go at you, though re-reading it does seem that way, so I do apologise. I'd had a couple of wines and whenever stuff like this comes up I do feel slightly hacked off at all the effort I'd put into help build that empire (I was a <500 beta user, and was also a diamond mod). And all I got was a lousy mug and some crappy pens :)
That response doesn't disagree with the complaint.
Y solves their problem and is marked as the answer.
But X is exactly what _I_ am trying to do, and would solve my problem. But any other question regarding X is marked as a duplicate of this first question which only solves Y and not X.
I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
> Discourse used to be a thing.
That is adorable.
Fine by me, there's enough hatred in the world already, go express it to a shrink, instead :-)
Some do, I'm sure, and I guess someone who posts normal stuff under their name and insane stuff under a pseudonym probably counts as "self-censoring," in a sense.
I don't see how this can be true overall, though. Ten years ago, the time the grandparent poster mentioned, was about when I was realizing that even though the election was over, people I'd known all my life weren't going to stop posting (under their own names) racist Obama memes on Facebook or Twitter, implicitly daring the still-sane people to call them on it. Things haven't improved notably since then. It's not something I think about a lot but my sentiment about internet dialogue over the past decade is definitely not hey, look at all the self-censorship going on. People are clearly concerned with how their comments will be perceived in the future.