Hi Ted, It was a thought provoking E-mail. Let me reply.
On Wednesday 27 Apr 2011 11:58:48 Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > On 4/22/2011 3:17 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > I recall that the traffic on the list was very overwhelming and that > > someone commented to me that whenever he set to compose a message > > answering a beginner, he already got several good replies by the time he > > finished. The traffic now may also be a bit too much, even for > > experienced people, but I recall it being much higher. > > That is common to all online forums and nothing to be concerned with. > > These forums were setup to help answer questions - many questioners > today will Google and find answers, often from archives of mailing lists > like this. > > In the last decade I have gotten answers to problems from postings as > old as 8 years prior. > You are probably right. I should also note that there's a lot of other choice, with Facebook forums (%-)), IRC, StackExchange sites (Stackoverflow/etc.), other web-forums (including perlmonks, which was very similar to Stackoverflow, a long time before SO existed) and others. So measuring activity based on traffic is misleading. One thing that irks me is that many people who ask questions intuitively think that asking the question in private (whether by accident or by intention) is a good idea. If I'm saying "foobar: add my to a variable" and get "/msg rindolf What is my?" then I need to tell him to answer on the channel, because he didn't study IRC netiquette. Of course, many people don't do that (most?) and just type my nickname manually (sometimes misspelt) but it happens often enough to get me irritated. I've seen my replies to a /msg 's a few years back (I have comprehensive logs) and they were much more friendly and polite than those recently. There's also the problem of the /topic not being read, which isn't really surprising giving that most users don't read most messages that are posted to a screen manually (it's a very known phenomenon in user-interface design and you must get to the bottom of it.). Of course, it doesn't help that people measure stuff based on such silly metrics, such as number of subscribers or participants or number of posts per year, which as you indicate is stupid. A lot of people think that Eric S/ Raymond (ESR) no longer does nothing of value in the open source software world, and just writes documents all day and posts silly posts and comments on his blog, but he actually did a lot of work on many random small stuff (and was quite quiet about it). This is one reason why my "Recent Hacktivity" blog posts were important in the past, because like ESR, I tend to do a lot of random work on things that interest me or even that I need. (Maybe Mr. Raymond should get a technical blog, because his non-technical "Armed and Dangerous" blog is a bit… something, and even I don't read it.). But thanks for the insight. I guess online forums now focus more on helping people with "Why my code does not work?" or answering people with really complex questions, or answering people who are too clueless or too lazy to Google, or just discussing tangential topics (humour/etc.). This may actually be a good thing, as you indicate and we just got to accepting it. > > http://unarmed.shlomifish.org/909.html > > > > It discusses Dealing with Provocative Internet people - based on the > > approach in the book "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy". > > Actually what is more useful about that link isn't your post, it is all > the blog posts appended to your post. > > I don't frankly believe that engaging people in the manner you describe > works very well. I think pretty much everyone has been taught by their > mothers at a young age the difference between asking for something in > a rude SOB manner and asking nicely. So the "aggressive posting" or > "trolling" or whatever you want to call it usually originates from > people who know better. Like porno, we know it when we see it. Hmmm..... maybe you're right. Still, if you reply properly, politely and in a friendly manner, you will be a few steps above the poster who say something like "pyton suxors! pearl is mch better, LOL, l0sers." (which is probably too lame to be a professional troll[1]) and thus people (and him) will think that you are winning. This is like I recall seeing a fellow Perl monger at our meetings in Tel Aviv University, in his work alphet which was a very elegant uniform, and then when I saw him come to my home for picking up some stuff in T-shirts and shorts (out of convenience), I had a much lower opinion on him. If you phrase yourself properly, with proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, idioms, etc. then people will consciouly and subconsciously think that you know what you're saying, even if you are much more clueless. This may be related to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect . [1] - we had one very sophisticated professional troll on #perl who posted code and then discussed how to write it properly ad-nuseum. Thing is he seemed to have known Perl very well, only pretended to be clueless. Eventually, I moved him to #perlcafe , and asked him what he studied and we quickly discovered it was an elaborate practical joke and he was probably laughing his ass off at us all the time. While he was malevolently reducing the SNR, it seemed like he was very professional as professional trolls go, and so was quite formidable and awe- inspiring as trolls go. Anyway, we realised now that if a person requires too much hand-holding (whether a professional troll or not) then they will be requested to move to #perlcafe or #perl-cats or wherever where they will do less damage. > > I suspect the reason things are not so polite on this list anymore > has much more to do with the changing nature of lists than anything > else. As I said, most people nowadays try googling up their answers > first, and only post to a forum as a last resort. So the posts your > going to see on these lists really are asking questions that cover > very "cutting edge" territory of Perl, where there is going to be more > disagreement. Such as, for example, the question of when do you > abandon old code and stop fixing bugs in it and replace it with > new code written in a modern style? There is no right answer for > this, at least not one that most people would agree on. Thus the > beginner who posts this is really asking an opinion question. That > is guaranteed to get a lot of opposing responses. > Well, yes or no, some people are clueless or lazy, and they need to be treated with respect, because they are potential contributors and have friends who care about them and some of them may even be star programmers, the kind who write a Lisp compiler in Assembly on the weekend for the Palm Pilot (naturally, this is an exaggeration, I was just paraphrasing Joel). There is a limit to how much you can be rude to people, as clueless as they are, while this hurting your reputation a lot. I don't want Perl to end up like GIMP, which is an incredibly powerful, important and usable project, with some talented people working on it, but since they are very hostile towards co- developers on the gimp-dev mailing list and other places no one works to work for them (and yes, I was a GIMP contributer at the time.). GIMP could have been much further along the road today if they had been more polite and friendly (which isn't hard). Now, the perl5-porters people are very polite and courteus, and encourage small and large contributions, but most people know a little better than to post questions there. It's good that many people post to the Perl mongers mailing lists where people are more polite than here, but it's not enough. I'm not saying you shouldn't instruct a person to use "strict;" and "warnings;" (which will be one step backwards and eventually two steps forward) or refuse to write his complex homework project for him, or whatever, but we should still be more hospitable. Someone here accused me of always being phony, but I told him that I'd rather err a little on being phony than on being rude and laconic and annoying, because the latter indicates that you don't care about the other person's feelings. > It is really better for most people to simply NOT respond to what they > think is trolling. Let the list members who DON'T think the post is > trolling, respond, and stay out of the thread. I think that is the best > advice for all online forums. Maybe. Still, asking "Why this code does not work?" is not trolling, and we should dissect the code. There are still many bad Perl tutorials out there and until we do some white-hat SEO work to reclaim Google , we will need to do it. My original response to Uri's post with advice was out-of-line and I now know better to respond to him in private, but I was only hoping for him to say "Yes, you're right, I'll try to pay attention" (and it wasn't aimed at him specifically.). If you haven't read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Sea already, you should. It tells the story of Captain Nemo, a person with a "Criminal Mind", who thinks the world at large is evil, and that people are superficial and that he and his crew are the only right people in the world. (I've met someone like that on IRC, and he is very persistent.). So he designs a submarine, build it and decides to live under the sea. Only this submarine, while a fine innovation is hardly the end-all and be-all of submarines (read the book to know why), which shows how incompetent Nemo actually is, because he thinks it's still perfect, and does not want to share his invention with the world and asking for improvements. I'm not claiming the people on this list are anywhere near as destructive or incompetent as Captain Nemo is, but it's still a valid analogy. Howard Roark, the noble arcitect protagonist of The Fountainhead (a very good book, BTW) exhibits similar symptoms, because instead of publishing as knowledge in books, and training future architects, he keeps all his insights to himself. Maybe when Rand wrote this book (and Atlas Shrugged naturally) keeping things secret was more fashionable, so we need to judge her works based on that (and many modern day Randians are all about being open and sharing their knowledge[Wikip], and insights, and that's what Ayn Rand practiced too when publishing her works as books), so it could be much worse. I guess no one's perfect, and as time progress, so does our views of what is right and what is wrong. [Wikip] - there's a very good coverage of Randianism on the English wikipedia and other wikimedia projects. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does "Zionism" mean? - http://shlom.in/def-zionism When Chuck Norris uses git, he takes a coffee break after initiating every git commit. And then he waits for the commit to finish. 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