It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well.
Is this true? When I was a kid using the internet to learn to code on the 2000s people seemed a lot meaner in general than they are now. It was hard to ask a question on a forum without being made to feel like an idiot.
When I was much younger I once wrote some random person, whose email I found in newsgroups, about my troubles getting Linux to compile. They responded politely and quickly, with a fix.
That person was Linus.
I've found my share of trolls and assholes, but likewise I've found that being forthright, polite and respectful tends to yield answers.
It's difficult to quantify that but I feel that you are right.
Imagine a term like "RTFM" being coined and used in popular tech formus today. Back in the days "RTFM" was a valid one-word response to any number of questions by a n00b; if said question was in an IRC channel you'd often get kicked or even kick-banned for good measure.
>Imagine a term like "RTFM" being coined and used in popular tech formus today
or "flamewar", which almost sounds a bit anachronistic now. I don't think I've been in one in a long time actually. The early 2000s were a lot rougher and often toxic compared to what you have today.
Internet discourse is still hit and miss but it's more mature.
I think today it's a lot less explicitly aggressive, but it's actually more meanspirited. It might be controversial to say this, but online discourse is a lot less male and a lot more female than it was. Is this any great surprise?
Strongly agree. It used to be the accepted norm that you’d ban relentlessly evade to get back at the admin who flamed you in their ban message. However, there was the tacit understanding that it was the internet and none of it was real: just log off and go outside once you got sick of it.
On one hand, I see so many occasions where someone typically new to something even if they aren’t new to programming asking questions that could be trivial found in a second.
On the other hand I’ve seen enough handwavy RTFM copypastas from people who clearly neglected to read the question being asked as well as enough manuals [documentation, etc.] that wants to make me bash my head in with how usuals, unspecific, difficult to navigate it is.
There’s been many times I’ve been hand waved in IRC channels to RTFM when the “manual” is multiple wikis or documents lacking essential points between them. The best ones are the wiki migrations where you can tell someone got in over their head trying to migrate to the new hotness.
Absolutely right, and you even provided a meta-example. Words like “feel” to describe thoughts would rarely be used, except to indicate a conclusion reached with minimal or no reasoning. “Think” vs. “feel” still rages today in some circles, and it mostly functions as a proxy for the person’s age.
I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.
As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.
Because most people know the documentation exists and people responding with RTfM aren’t doing so to be helpful but to be impolite. If you’re gonna respond with RTFM just don’t respond and it’ll have the same effect.
Yes but some people ask questions rather than try to look for answers in the documentation, since it is perceived lower effort than looking in the documentation themselves. It is quicker to ask a question than look through the documentation, especially if you are not sure about the right keyword for your query. Plus if you ask a question you get to define the criteria for a valid answer to include an example that almost exactly matches your situation.
Edit: I feel like I should point out that I agree that RTFM is an incredibly offensive term, but some form of answer like: “it is covered in the documentation” actually conveys one important bit of information: The answer can actually be found in the documentation.
When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
You could learn how to write a better question. I've got ~140 questions on SO and none of them ever had hostile responses. Usually questions are downvoted because they're:
* vague
* no code example
* pretty basic that a google search could answer your question
* same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over
Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile).
If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different.
I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
I’ve seen really good answers who were despite being correct were downvoted in favor of someone with a higher SO score.
I posted an answer to a question like 10 years ago before dynamic or anonymous types existed in .NET. It was valid and I later prefixed it to say another answer is now correct but mine was correct for the version of .NET in question.
Still has people downvoting today.
It really sucks answering questions and investing time when people downvote for silly stupid reasons.
I’ve also seen questions asked which were good questions with examples and such. But downvoted because “that’s now how you do it” despite “I can’t do it that way because of constraints in the system”
Part of SO is really good! It’s been a game changer. But it’s really a different community now than when it started. I miss the early days.
I once answered a question on SO and included a link to some sample code (production-quality actually) that I had written several years before. The answer was (I thought) on-topic, clear, and helpful (it gave the questioner everything they needed to solve their problem). It was downvoted to oblivion, apparently because I included the link. Then I removed the link and just pasted the 150 lines or so of sample code directly into the answer, but my “reputation” is still negative as a result so I can’t answer any questions. As a result, I have zero interest in ever trying to contribute to SO again.
> I posted an answer to a question like 10 years ago before dynamic or anonymous types existed in .NET. It was valid and I later prefixed it to say another answer is now correct but mine was correct for the version of .NET in question.
> Still has people downvoting today.
Aye that sucks. I have a PHP answer that is the accepted answer, but the PHP wonks got all up in arms about it because the immediate solution for the OP was to use the global keyword in their class method to get access to an array that's being created/modified in the global scope. I did caveat by letting them know this isn't a fantastic solution. But it looks like their app had a shedload of bigger problems that weren't going to be solved in my answer.
I also miss the early days.
Apropos my previous reply, I wasn't having a go at you, though re-reading it does seem that way, so I do apologise. I'd had a couple of wines and whenever stuff like this comes up I do feel slightly hacked off at all the effort I'd put into help build that empire (I was a <500 beta user, and was also a diamond mod). And all I got was a lousy mug and some crappy pens :)
My biggest gripe with SO is when someone asks "How do you do X?" and someone responds, "you don't need to do X to solve your problem, you can do Y."
Y solves their problem and is marked as the answer.
But X is exactly what _I_ am trying to do, and would solve my problem. But any other question regarding X is marked as a duplicate of this first question which only solves Y and not X.
StackOverflow isn't really for beginner questions/"help me learn" kind of stuff. In the course of trying to come up with answers to most questions, they knocked out the easy/fundamental ones early.
I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
I wonder if I’m the only one who read your comment and flashed back to a time in the distant past when some genuinely, maliciously, irredeemably batshit crazy people used to post on the FreeBSD mailing lists. One memorable guy who I will not name went on later to become of all things an investor and finance blogger and apparently claims to have helped found the Tea Party, which is all just absurdly hilarious.
Some do, I'm sure, and I guess someone who posts normal stuff under their name and insane stuff under a pseudonym probably counts as "self-censoring," in a sense.
I don't see how this can be true overall, though. Ten years ago, the time the grandparent poster mentioned, was about when I was realizing that even though the election was over, people I'd known all my life weren't going to stop posting (under their own names) racist Obama memes on Facebook or Twitter, implicitly daring the still-sane people to call them on it. Things haven't improved notably since then. It's not something I think about a lot but my sentiment about internet dialogue over the past decade is definitely not hey, look at all the self-censorship going on. People are clearly concerned with how their comments will be perceived in the future.
I've been self-censoring pretty much since Dejanews ca.1995. Ironically Google have made the Deja archives progressively harder to discover since acquisition.
Discourse used to be a thing.