Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkcorrea | Hacker News Reader

Problem is all the pragmatic people you want answering your questions are too pragmatic to spend time reading and leaving comments on the internet

Never say never but I don't think it's very easy to build a broad and helpful community where the factors you listed aren't at play in people's motivations.

I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with. Discord servers are a great example

View on HN

A lot of really smart and talented developers participate in mailing lists as well.

As someone who used to frequently help out online in the past, the problem is that the questions never stop coming and most are usually from people who refuse to do the bare minimum amount of research or reading. This would be fine were it not typically bundled with a lack of respect for your time and a strong sense of entitlement.

can you recommend some discord servers for tech help?

> I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with.

Probably true for some sites and not others. I would definitely say the more niche you go in subreddits, the more helpful people are, but that's not really true of Stack Overflow communities.

The same effect can be accomplished on StackOverflow by more narrowly tagging questions to specific technology niches, so that it does not show up on the watch lists of generic moderators.

Technology specific IRCs are still great resources as well!

I really wish IRC was still the defecto choice for open source projects. Now days all I see is gitter/slack/discord/matrix which I find all have a significantly worse experience than IRC.

If IRC was stateful (ie, it would "remember"/deliver offline messages when I sign-on again (at least buffer them for some configurable period)), I'd be onboard with using it for almost everything

But it's not

That's what made Slack so appealing early on - IRC-like communication with history

Maybe you know already, but you can use an IRC relay to act as pseudo client, connect to that and then read back on messages. You’ll have to find a place to host it though. For example, “The Lounge”.

Edit: typo

Yeah, you can ... but that's a bolt-on/additional service that, quite frankly, IRC ought to Just Do™ at this point

It's 2022, not 1988 :)

I just keep my irssi running on a Vultr VM.

I used to do that

Too much hassle, imo

IRC has OP’s problem taken to the next level. The people clinging onto IRC in this age are increasingly insufferable.

That's the opposite of my experience even to this day. As long as you follow question asking etiquette (do research before you ask, don't ask to ask, explain what you've tried so far, etc), people are usually good at answering questions when they can.

Funnily enough your comment describes SO just the same. How many people complaining about SO here have really just asked poor questions, hadn't explained what they tried, didn't do enough research first to ask a good question, etc.

You may both be right. Chances are this varies wildly from IRC channel to IRC channel.

And there's the factor that communicating through writing is hard as the lack of non-verbal cues means that you have to seek clarifications to be sure that you actually understood what the other person was trying to say. More so if they are strangers.

OP should consider listening to this answer. It’s been 17 days since this poster commented on HN last so they pass the unpragmatic smell test.

The pragmatic people solve their problems by asking for help and part of that involves stumbling upon questions they have answers for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com