This reminds me of a great book, "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation", by Lave and Wegner (an anthropologist and a computer scientist). This book deals with how newcomers to a community of practice interact with core practitioners to learn the central knowledge/beliefs of that community. As newcomers move from the periphery to the center of practice, their criticisms to the body of central knowledge become more acceptable to the community as a whole. This of course causes the "center" of the community to shift over time as new members cycle in to a community and old members exit.
How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
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Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#12I'm just experiencing "hostility to newcomers" on HN. My comments have been repeatedly voted down for no apparent reason. I just can't imagine people loving nuclear weapons and such so why vote me down for speaking out in favor of pacifism.
Hold on. You've been here for almost two years. You registered 8 months and 11 days after News.YC launched. You are in no way a newcomer. PS: Cool, an excuse to use Wolfram Alpha! It does calendar computations quite nicely. "Feb 19, 2007 to X days ago" to figure out when someone joined relative to the launch of News.YC.
Yeah, I registered two years ago and clicked five times. After that I've been here just once. Then I started contributing a week ago. So I am indeed a newcomer.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#13I'm just experiencing "hostility to newcomers" on HN. My comments have been repeatedly voted down for no apparent reason. I just can't imagine people loving nuclear weapons and such so why vote me down for speaking out in favor of pacifism.
Not true. After reading through your past comments on this site as I have, you will see that the only times you have been downvoted are when you bring political views into conversations where it is almost entirely off-topic. Plenty of your comments in other threads have been upvoted, so laying the blame for your treatment on the rest of the community here is disingenuous.
It's not off topic to speak out against militarism on a post that is cheerleading the military for being hilarious. I know people in the US love guns and are proud to "liberate" countries in the middle east but in Europe people think differently. I was surprised to see militarism being hailed in a tech and business oriented social news community. You don't want my political opinion stop promoting the army.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#14This article solidifies something that's been rattling around in my head for a month or three.
It relates to a post on HN (which I can't find now) about job interviews. I think the article was written by an interviewer, who said he liked to hire someone who could offer a knowledgeable, well reasoned critique of his organization.
The implication is that, if you're looking for a job, you should aim at doing that kind of thing. I had a problem with that, but I could not articulate it very well. This article filled in the gaps in my thinking.
Wish I could find that old post ....
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold on. You've been here for almost two years. You registered 8 months and 11 days after News.YC launched. You are in no way a newcomer. PS: Cool, an excuse to use Wolfram Alpha! It does calendar computations quite nicely. "Feb 19, 2007 to X days ago" to figure out when someone joined relative to the launch of News.YC.
Yeah, I registered two years ago and clicked five times. After that I've been here just once. Then I started contributing a week ago. So I am indeed a newcomer.
If no one knew you're a newcomer until you told us, there's no way for this article to be pertinent to your perceived slights.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I registered two years ago and clicked five times. After that I've been here just once. Then I started contributing a week ago. So I am indeed a newcomer.
If no one knew you're a newcomer until you told us, there's no way for this article to be pertinent to your perceived slights.
It's more the other way around: No one knew me so they assumed I'm new. Don't you ever look at the author of a submission or comment to recognize the nick?