harmonea

harmonea, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I was trying to run my own personal-use instance of LiveJournal back 20 years ago when it was open source (and not owned by Russia). Just to see if I could, as is the spirit of a tinkerer.

There was a handful of paid staff as well as a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers, so I expected one of them to answer a low-priority newbie support request, not.. what I got.

harmonea, 1 year ago

Some people in the world are just dicks, but that doesn’t mean we should reject interacting with everyone.

Corollary: Your personal aversion to corporations doesn't mean users have have any motivation or obligation to keep trying when we're getting pushback from both the software and those who maintain it.

Anyway, I'm not sure how you got that I reject interacting with everyone after my experience, but extrapolating my statement to that kind of extreme phrasing sure doesn't fill me with confidence about future interactions, either.

harmonea, 1 year ago

I still can't really agree that the comparison holds; we try harder in real life because the bar for being a dick is (usually) higher. On the internet, when all it takes is a few easy sentences to be a dick to a faceless stranger whose reaction we don't have to see... to me, the response should be equally fluid, else we get bogged down being the only one putting in the effort and taking a constant beating to our self-esteem when we wonder why no one is bothering to hear us.

However, I appreciate you being chill about clearing up what you meant. I did initially miss the comparison you were going for and feel like I was getting cereal box therapy about not cutting people off (and thus staying in toxic communities) when that wasn't what you meant.

Cheers back.

harmonea, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

That's absolutely the worst help forum experience, when you're asking one question but everyone extrapolates the question they think you REALLY meant to ask and talks down to you about it.

And of course if you try to steer the conversation back to your actual question, you get painted as the unreasonable one placing all sorts of conditions on the generous free help others are allowed to bestow upon you.

The less reliance on others Linux requires, the better off it will be for general adoption.

harmonea, 1 year ago

I think it's done more good than harm and don't want to see them anonymized again... but I do have to say I've found myself withholding a downvote that I think was completely justifiable and deserved because I didn't want to be the first and only one and get shit for it.