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Comment by _def | Hacker News Reader

> you could really learn from the best if you could handle the abuse

Care to elaborate? I assume there was cliche rough tone and elitism going on, but I don't know

The price for saying something ignorant was usually pretty high in the form of verbal abuse, and you had to be willing to cater to that elitist attitude in many cases. Infosec had, and continues to have a gate keeping problem. The strange thing to me is that the scene pretty much died, but these zombies live on, half alive but without a strong community talking about them.

Btw not talking about spender or jduck here, just the scene overall.

That was pretty much any IRC community

There were always elitist channels but they'd be invite only.

The rest you could lurk in however much you wanted.

lol, been in #linux in the last.. say.. twenty years?

Or #c

Maybe a few years ago. I don't recall there being any on topic conversation

For sure, and still is in many cases. I'm used to it tbh, but the HN community has plenty of folks who don't understand and have no need to tolerate or adapt to that kind of stimulus.

>scene pretty much died

Did they finally have kids?

Community infosec does have an asshole problem, but not a gatekeeping problem.

Every single infosec community I grew up in was more than willing to share knowledge and the only requirements were a willingness to learn and ask questions. And skin thick enough to tolerate rudeness if there was any disagreement.

Unless I misunderstood what you meant by gatekeeping?

I regret to inform you these are exactly the same thing.

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