Building Social Software for the Anti-Social | Hacker News Reader

Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

codinghorror.com

32 pointsmootothemax6 comments

Why, oh why, this stupid meme that programmers are asocial or antisocial still exists in this day and age? Is it because of some antisocial programmer individual that wants to be like everyone else, and label everyone else as antisocial? Or is it because they have less "friends" than merketing guys whose job is to call acquaintances friend? I agree that there are asocial people in this profession, but no more than in any other profession, and this generalization is only making harm to other programmers.

As a punishment to this name calling, I will remove his site from my "Ad block" exceptions list and will call all my "friends" to do that too ;)

I agree that there are asocial people in this profession, but no more than in any other profession

I think this is clearly false. The sciences attract the type of personality that is capable of intense focus which seems to be paired with some difficulties in social interaction (Asperger's lite?).

While I'm well socially adjusted now, I am introverted by nature and had to work at fixing social deficiencies my friends never exhibited. When I look at peers in my field I see either people like me who had to work at being socially well-adjusted or people who are still socially stunted because they never took the time to work on it. I have met very very few programmer-social-butterflies.

I believe this also explains why there are relatively few women in our field: this type of personality is not as common in women.

[That being said, I think 'Anti-Social' is more of an insult than a description of a personality trait. And his presentation looks condescending.]

Ok, this might be true, and logical. But then, it still applies in the same sense to civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and all engineers in general, not only programmers. But still, only programmers are flagged with "asocial" flags.

I program. I am able to be social at a basic, perhaps proficient level. Frankly, I sometimes... no, often... find relating to other people, especially other non-nerds or non-programmers to be a real hassle, something I have to put effort into rather than just letting it flow.

With other nerds / programmers, it's easy: we share common interests. Yet where are the social venues for nerds and programmers? All in places unseen by more uh... "normal" (don't kill me plz) people. Maybe this is where the antisocial perception comes from.

I do believe asocial would be a more accurate term. Anti-social is more or less synonymous with psychopath.

I'm not sure I would term these ten ideas "counterintuitive"; in fact they come off as rather obvious, apropos the modern web. Maybe I'm in the minority on this but it seems like even just visiting SO a couple of times you get an impression for how and why it works and that seems to have been applied more broadly, e.g. Quora, to carry on with the Q&A model. Clearly treating this kind of thing as a social game is the root of the success of social news, for instance. Possibly this is just the benefit of the hindsight, nonetheless, certainly today they aren't counterintuitive?

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