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> Yep. This is one of the big problems with online communities. When someone makes a bold statement, I have no idea if they’re a grizzled engineer with grizzled

by JadeNB 3y ago

> Yep. This is one of the big problems with online communities. When someone makes a bold statement, I have no idea if they’re a grizzled engineer with grizzled, hard earned engineering opinions, or some kid fresh out of a coding bootcamp who thinks they’re all that. In person, I’d treat those two people incredibly differently. Online? It’s impossible to spot the difference. I know there are limits to this, but isn't that a good thing, too? It's all too easy to treat a newbie as if they can't possibly have useful things to offer to the community; being forced to treat all comments equally, without being able to fall back on the crutch of reputation, arguably forces one to read and engage more deeply with the content, and offers the chance to surface the occasional genuinely valuable contribution from a newbie (or, for that matter, to avoid letting someone get away with an ill considered or overbroad statement just because they have such a big reputation that people are too afraid to stand up to them).

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
True, but occasionally a newbie offers a solution to a problem and rejects the rejection when people try to tell them why their solution won't work. For example, several years ago here on HN, during a thread about cryptography, someone admitted to not knowing much about cryptography, but offered one-time pads as a solution to the weaknesses of PKI. I tried to tell them that OTP solve a different problem that is unrelated to PKI, but they wanted nothing of it. They claimed that my response was purely emotional and that just because I knew more than them about cryptography doesn't automatically make them wrong. When I tried the Socratic Method to lead them towards an understanding of why they were wrong, they accused me of being condescending and said that I should answer my own questions. If I see a bold claim that I have a hard time believing, then I'll ask follow-up questions. But when someone makes a bold claim that is just factually incorrect, while admitting they don't know much, and then get upset when someone tells them why it's incorrect, then that's just plain frustrating.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > If I see a bold claim that I have a hard time believing, then I'll ask follow-up questions. But when someone makes a bold claim that is just factually incorrect, while admitting they don't know much, and then get upset when someone tells them why it's incorrect, then that's just plain frustrating. But that doesn't seem a situation that would have been addressed by fixing the problem that you originally identified: > Yep. This is one of the big problems with online communities. When someone makes a bold statement, I have no idea if they’re a grizzled engineer with grizzled, hard earned engineering opinions, or some kid fresh out of a coding bootcamp who thinks they’re all that. In person, I’d treat those two people incredibly differently. Online? It’s impossible to spot the difference. Here, it sounds like you knew on which side of the divide a person fell. The resulting problem is still a problem, but it's one that also occurs offline!

by JadeNB 3y ago

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

True, but occasionally a newbie offers a solution to a problem and rejects the rejection when people try to tell them why their solution won't work. For example, several years ago here on HN, during a thread about cryptography, someone admitted to not knowing much about cryptography, but offered one-time pads as a solution to the weaknesses of PKI. I tried to tell them that OTP solve a different problem that is unrelated to PKI, but they wanted nothing of it. They claimed that my response was purely emotional and that just because I knew more than them about cryptography doesn't automatically make them wrong. When I tried the Socratic Method to lead them towards an understanding of why they were wrong, they accused me of being condescending and said that I should answer my own questions. If I see a bold claim that I have a hard time believing, then I'll ask follow-up questions. But when someone makes a bold claim that is just factually incorrect, while admitting they don't know much, and then get upset when someone tells them why it's incorrect, then that's just plain frustrating.

JadeNB 3y ago
> If I see a bold claim that I have a hard time believing, then I'll ask follow-up questions. But when someone makes a bold claim that is just factually incorrect, while admitting they don't know much, and then get upset when someone tells them why it's incorrect, then that's just plain frustrating. But that doesn't seem a situation that would have been addressed by fixing the problem that you originally identified: > Yep. This is one of the big problems with online communities. When someone makes a bold statement, I have no idea if they’re a grizzled engineer with grizzled, hard earned engineering opinions, or some kid fresh out of a coding bootcamp who thinks they’re all that. In person, I’d treat those two people incredibly differently. Online? It’s impossible to spot the difference. Here, it sounds like you knew on which side of the divide a person fell. The resulting problem is still a problem, but it's one that also occurs offline!