You're not wrong, but running Linux directly correlates to more time spent on "tech forums in general," so it's still a bigger problem with that OS than others imo.
There's this amazing chicken enchilada soup I've had whose ingredients include a whole pack of this stuff (specifically in Velveeta form, but it's the same stuff). Best damn soup I've ever tasted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(a week of bass guitar video recommendations for some reason)
Sometimes I wish youtube's algorithm were sentient so I could shake it and ask why the fuck--
For me it was a week of growing your own backyard basil. Not herb gardens, not vegetables, not self-sufficiency in general. Literally just basil. I don't even own a single plant.
I feel sad looking back over what reddit became. I don't regret any of my actions in response. And even if I did, my actions were reddit's fault; they'd get the blame, so I'd still have nothing to regret.
I won't contribute to a website that treats the people who built it the way they did, so their choice to treat their community and app devs that way directly resulted in my actions.
To give the poster the benefit of the doubt, it's probably just a very poorly worded frustration that /r/20flavorsofshitpost (with the mindless horde) is operational when /r/thethingiwant (with a passionate small community that adds a lot of value) is dead. It sure could have been communicated better, but I really don't think it's meant to claim the protest only affects the poster's interests.
It's harder to see the difference when 10% of a huge sub leaves than 80% of a tiny one.
Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
There were so many times I was browsing reddit and thought to myself, "this didn't deserve a post of its own." Was it content related to the subreddit? Absolutely. But it was simple, trite, repetitive - for example, just someone having a halfway neat experience in a game, but with an incident for which the novelty had worn thin for long-term players long ago. (oh so your taming inspiration lined up with a thrumbo passing, wao sugoi moving on....)
On the flip side, I'd often want to share my inane thoughts about a topic with others interested in that topic, but I knew my inane thoughts didn't really warrant a whole post. Sometimes I just wanted to say "I thought this event story was neat" without adding a "what did you think?" and massaging whatever discussion thread followed.
So, in short, I had a higher standard for what counted as discussion-worthy and was dissatisfied when both consuming and producing content because of it.
The kbin magazine blend of discussion threads and microblogs is perfect for this sort of problem, in my opinion, which is why kbin is my ideal setup. You clearly define when you want to make a discussion space for everyone vs. when you want to just bounce a thought into other like-minded people simply by whether you create a thread or a microblog, and you don't need two different sites (reddit/twitter, or lemmy/mastodon) to do it.