4 ms·
Chat-style environments are the only place I’ve seen this sort of “occur naturally”. It requires a defined culture, a bit of shared value, and active enforceme
by ergonaught 4y ago
Chat-style environments are the only place I’ve seen this sort of “occur naturally”.
It requires a defined culture, a bit of shared value, and active enforcement, so it is more the domain of paid services or private niche communities.
Ancient anecdote: it was specifically this difference in responses to questions on the mailing lists that lead me to use MySQL over PostgreSQL.
It is a problem everywhere, particularly where the barrier to entry has been lowered or removed, and it’s mostly a signal:noise issue in the absence of a fitness (quality) function.
- Archelaos 4y agoAbout 20 years ago I run a mailing list for one of my open source projects of that time. I think there were two aspects that contributed towards its very helpful atmosphere: a) There was no mailing list archive. b) I tried to answer as kindly as possible, even to very simple questions, trying to create a paradigm. There was also another reason behind not having an archive: I treated every question as a bug in the documentation, because if the documentation had been better, the person would not have had to ask in the first place. Especially when a similar question came up a second time, I thought hard about how I could improve the documentation to clarify the issue there.