Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 unrel…
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!