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This being HN, I'd love to hear from one of the many IRC channel mods who literally typed (I'd guess copy/pasted) this kind of text into their chat room topics

This being HN, I'd love to hear from one of the many IRC channel mods who literally typed (I'd guess copy/pasted) this kind of text into their chat room topics and auto-responders. If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? To be clear, I'm taking OP's experience as a common case of IRC newbies at that time on many channels. I certainly experienced something like it (though I can't remember the exact text), and I've read many others post on HN about the same behavior from the IRC days. Edit: clarifications

zahlman 2y ago
>If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)... ... I'm kinda envious. Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software. There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else. Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation). But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.
CogitoCogito 2y ago
> was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? Maybe that was the point?
- haolez 2y ago
  To be fair, after the ban expired, I started submitting the test cases as instructed and the community was very helpful under these constraints.
  - oniony 2y ago
    Are you saying it worked?
    - haolez 2y ago
      Well, the tone was unnecessarily rude, and the ban period was excessive, but after complying, they were very helpful.
HPsquared 2y ago
I think a lot of unpaid online discussion forum moderation volunteers get psychic profit from power tripping.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Give a man a little power.
a57721 2y ago
> social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years Oh my, this reminded me how some 20 years ago I was a high school kid and dared to install a more nerdy Linux distro (which I won't name here) on my home computer. After some big upgrade, the system stopped booting, and when in panic I asked for help at the official forum, I got responses that were shaming me for blindly copying commands from their official website without consulting some README files. That's how I switched to Debian and never looked back.

zahlman 2y ago

>If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)... ... I'm kinda envious. Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software. There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else. Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation). But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.

CogitoCogito 2y ago

> was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? Maybe that was the point?

haolez 2y ago
To be fair, after the ban expired, I started submitting the test cases as instructed and the community was very helpful under these constraints.
- oniony 2y ago
  Are you saying it worked?
  - haolez 2y ago
    Well, the tone was unnecessarily rude, and the ban period was excessive, but after complying, they were very helpful.

HPsquared 2y ago

I think a lot of unpaid online discussion forum moderation volunteers get psychic profit from power tripping.

hinkley 2y ago
Give a man a little power.

a57721 2y ago

> social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years Oh my, this reminded me how some 20 years ago I was a high school kid and dared to install a more nerdy Linux distro (which I won't name here) on my home computer. After some big upgrade, the system stopped booting, and when in panic I asked for help at the official forum, I got responses that were shaming me for blindly copying commands from their official website without consulting some README files. That's how I switched to Debian and never looked back.