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I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small and hard-to-discover. There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly d

• MaulingMonkey 8y ago
  > I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small and hard-to-discover. Size varies. I'm idling in Mozilla's #rust and that has 1390 people in it alone. And small communities are still communities, I'd argue as well! > There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into "please do my homework." At least, in my experience. There will always be (attempted) freeloaders in any community. How they're handled varies - I've been in several with explicit no-homework policies, where the community will give you grief if you didn't even try to google, strongly steering people towards developing their ability to help themselves rather than relying on handouts. "Teach a man to fish" etc. Which isn't to say people won't still try, but it can be managed and policed. Even there, people will generally help out when someone encounters a totally strange/niche/not easily understood or explained edge case, if only to better understand it for themselves, or to spend a minute to save another person hours. But that's a win/win as far as I'm concerned - not much of a community IMO if you're not willing to do that!