Another interesting effect I experienced is regarding expert credibility.
When I found this place, I was impressed. I figured the world's top engineers are posting. I see them writing about very advanced topics I know little about. Comments are well written, and combined this creates trust.
But there's been incidents. I'm the type of person that has an extremely deep level of knowledge in about 2 or 3 very niche topics that frankly normally nobody cares about. I know that sounds pretentious, but for the sake of argument, let's accept it for now.
By chance, very infrequently, an article and discussion may be about those extremely niche topics. And now things are falling apart. As before, seemingly insightful professional-level comments are written. The problem is, 70% of them are wrong. I'm not talking "different opinion", I mean factually wrong, that's not how this works, and you seem to have no idea what you're talking about.
I imagine to the outsider not in the niche reading along: interesting expert discussion. Just as I was reading about all those topics I know little about.
This raises the obvious question: when I read impressive comments regarding topics I know little about, how many are actually trustworthy and accurate expertise versus how many are just well written made up nonsense?
This question hits me hard because it kind of forces you to become skeptical and cynical by default, which I don't want to be.
I you want to see this escalated to an Olympic level, watch Meta Stack Exchange over time. It has quite a few characters that are writing lecture-length posts on a daily basis. About...nothing of any remote importance or relevance. Usually concerning some petty complaint or idea about the site, none of which any actual user will ever know about.
In a way, they are 5 star trolls. The most difficult ones to recognize as they seem to well-worded.
FWIw, contrarianism has kind of become, in technical forums, a proxy for correctness and value.
But that’s just it, the truth will always be offensive to someone. You’ll always be the asshole to “someone”. If we structure discourse around never being perceived as an asshole by anyone we effectively yield the zeitgeist to whoever is the biggest crybaby.
It’s not just this site, this line of thinking has infected most western dialog.
The entire metric is flawed and useless.
That's not to say, "be an arsehole" or go against ToS, but definitely it's made me willing to stand my ground even when I hold unpopular opinions or opinions where my culture clashes with the dominant one.
Because if you do it enough you’ll find yourself with a 3 comment per hour rate limit or shadowban. The moderation here actively discourages meaningful discussion in favor of sterile communication. It’s boring.
Fighting idiocy that gets entrenched by the even a few comments is challenging. But depending on circumstances, there are specific rhetorical strategies that can be effective. IE, sometimes they work and sometimes they're futile. I like to flatter myself that deciding whether you can make an impact is bit like looking for a good shot in advanced pool.
But the thing here is, there's no guarantee that an actual expert "old hand" is going to know any of these approaches. So you have to read the discussion with this in mind.
Years ago I attended a small code conference in my city; just a general "programmers hang out and give talks type of thing".
Someone gave a presentation about Scala (I think it was Scala anyway); it was a general introduction explaining the semantics, ideas, syntax, etc. At the end someone asked a question: "In our experience [some practical problem they encountered, I forgot what exactly], how do you deal with this"?
"Oh, we haven't really used Scala in production, I just learned it; I don't really know".
That also perfectly describes LinkedIn these days