Comment by the-smug-one | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the-smug-one | Hacker News Reader

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Edit: OK, I've calmed down. It might not be worth reading what's below this paragraph. The TL;DR is: The cost of helping people is high, it takes time and energy from you. There are people who don't care about your time and energy, they'll use you as much as possible. These people are called help vampires.

>Please don't follow the advice of this column. Be patient. Encourage anyone and everyone to ask questions, even if they're "duplicates" or "easy to answer". Use the Socratic Method (ask questions that lead to more questions). Actually teach people things.

I will not do this unless the person I'm teaching is showing a willingness to dedicate their own resources to the issues at hand. I'll do this for my own child, but if you seriously apply this online at big forums you'll get infested with help vampires. Help vampires F:ing SUCK, for real. You speak with a lot of pathos and like you've never have tried to help people a lot and had to deal with these. These people will do anything to take your energy and time away from you. They'll ask a question that's answerable in the FAQ, you'll direct them there, and they'll say "oh, it's just nicer to speak to people, can't you tell me :)?" or "my situation is very special, it's not answered by the FAQ".

I'm ranting, but holy crap having to deal with help vampires completely destroys your outlook on these things.

It would be better to help zero people than it would be to develop the bitter attitude you've developed - this is because your attitude could prevent people from helping!

I feel you've helped too many people, with too little reward, and for that matter with too little progress in your ability to help.

That's not the fault of the people needing help, though, now is it? So why are you characterizing them as vampires?

IMO rather than embittering people against helping others, you should retire from helping ppl that aren't paying for your help. That way, you'll stop embittering and misguiding helper volunteers, whose jobs literally ARE to help people who don't seem to "get" the docs.

You're denying a person's lived experience and telling them to stop doing what they love. That's not very nice.

And I know what they're talking about. I'll put it a bit more politely: You can't help people who aren't willing to help themselves.

It's a thing. When you start helping out people in forums or on irc or what have you, sooner or later you'll encounter people who either can't be helped or just require far too much energy. No matter how much you'd like to help everyone, you just can't. It happens.

I believe parent poster has already calmed down, but I can understand their feelings. It's frustrating sometimes!

The many people you are able to help make up for it though.

like I said it's better to not help people at all than to evolve the attitude that some people don't want to help themselves. people typically want to help themselves but don't know how, and might have self-defeating habits - that's not a moral failing though, that's just how people are, and what educators must overcome.

When a helper fails to advocate for these people, it's wrong to conclude that they didn't want the help - a moral judgement. The help being offerred might not have been good enough, or the person might not have been ready for help.

In the end, whenever we do get to help someone we should be happy (since that improves the work. But when we fail someone - or we think someone has failed themselves - we should not be bitter, but become better at finding those who we can help, and improving what we offer to those we help.

I don't think you would doubt any of what I said. Instead, I think you're here to defend a morally negative view of students and others who "do not want to work" for the help. And I think that's wrong.

In roughly 90-99% of all cases, we are in agreement. And if you only encounter a few difficult <students> a year, it can definitely be worth the effort.

On the other hand, if you're in a situation where you're encountering random people on the internet at a rate of say 10-100 (or more) per day (possibly never to return); then the way you deal with it is you look for signs that the person has been trying. If they have: you go out of your way to help them, you absolutely do. But if they haven't, sometimes all you can do is hope that one day they'll run across someone like you in real life, who can teach them kindness and respect and humility.

I'm curious now, in what kind of environment have you worked? Are you a teacher?

see also: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/help_vampire

I agree with the other commenter, though maybe with less profanity.

Think of it this way, helping people is good, right? So you should help the people who are trying to help you.

> this is because your attitude could prevent people from helping!

Likewise, the attitude of people who put in minimal effort and expect lots of effort from volunteers causes the volunteers to burn out and makes it less likely that people will help you. Heck, even if they don't directly quit, they'll even end up with other people telling them to stop helping people.

Basically the thesis is that we can make needy and hapless students less needy and more self reliant by publicly roasting the most needy and hapless students among them. So basically lets bully the students into being more competent, because we're sad that our naive approach didn't help them.

That's an ethically bankrupt position, and I reject it.

You're simply wrong here. Any teacher who starts to be paranoid about the ineptitude of their students will be MISERABLE. Instead, teachers must establish better boundaries, and better materials and methods for their students.

For instance, I've /been/ the hapless student, and you probably have been too. I've asked silly X-Y questions. I've refused to read the docs before asking questions that have been asked millions of times before. And what helped me was people linking me to articles on how to ask good questions and how to get good answers and generally how to help and be helped.

Throwing in the towel and saying "man these students are just too lazy and expect too much" is not going to help the community, and it's not going to make the students magically ask more insightful and considerate questions. In my experience working with tutors, professors, mentors, and students in both professional, open source, and academic contexts, no skilled and happy teacher thinks or talks this way about their students.

So if you want to relate to students this way, just realize that it's no better than haplessly trying to help everyone in the first place:

- It still burns you out and makes you miserable (in fact, it's the one of the end stages of burnout)

- It still fails to make your students more self-reliant

If that's what you want, please continue to denigrate people who, after all, simply want to be helped and don't know how to be helped.

No one has put forward the thesis that one should roast needy and hapless students!

Rather the opposite. Though this document is written for people who ask questions, see also the section on how to help.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#idm667 (How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way )

(Of course: this is ESR. He's ... opinionated. But does seem to have his heart in the right place in the end)

You're the one who wants to bully everyone who disagrees with you.

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