While this may not be the case in this situation, recently I've noticed that people are becoming extreme wimps.. People, especially younger generation can't stand being treated harshly. You can't criticize them, and every response must be nice, politically correct and helpful. Sometimes you just have to let it go, or simply fight back. And when you do fight back, be prepared because it's unlikely that you will win ev…
"People, especially younger generation can't stand being treated harshly. You can't criticize them, and every response must be nice, politically correct and helpful."
The same thing seems to happen in many mailing lists or newsgroups once they reach a certain size, as well as on discussion boards, stackoverflow, and other sites like wikipedia. One person called them 'RTFM jerks': http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006033100126OPCY On the python lists, they were called NIMPY ("Not in my Python!"): http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=87182 You combine a power st…
"Even without a power structure, people will try to dominate, bully others, by posting more frequently than anyone else in an effort to drown out other opinions or contributions." This can be easily countered with setting user quota (per day of week or whatever) on emails to the list. Not that this is a cure for all - but I believe this can improve the democracy of mailing lists. I hope some mailing list management s…
Some of the Wikipedia mailing lists did this a year or two ago, adding a limit of 30 posts per person per month. Not sure it's had any significant impact on the community, but it has somewhat reduced the volume of a few really, really prolific posters, which is a slight improvement to the S:N ratio. (There exist mailing lists where the most prolific posters are also good contributors, but imo this is not true of the Wikipedia lists, so the cap has mostly excluded posts I find noisy/redundant.)
Would one potential solution be to create a secondary optional gatekeeper? The basic idea would be - don't submit directly. First submit to the community gatekeepers, they will look over your work, and if they think it will meet approval, they'll pass it on. Otherwise they can give helpful feedback. They can have strong standards about how contributors are treated. This extra step can be optional - if you don't mind…
Not defending anyone just a 30,000 foot view. The issue is that it really appears that it is a clash in personalities. When someone says they love R's community and then emphasis that it is a terrible language they lost me. In Open Source there are many examples of "mean" gate keepers. We see splits in the communities with examples all over i.e. ffmpeg vs libav. This isn't the way to go about change by belittling the…
Down vote for giving an opinion great to see the defenders of Hacker News.
"Even without a power structure, people will try to dominate, bully others, by posting more frequently than anyone else in an effort to drown out other opinions or contributions." This can be easily countered with setting user quota (per day of week or whatever) on emails to the list. Not that this is a cure for all - but I believe this can improve the democracy of mailing lists. I hope some mailing list management s…
Some of the Wikipedia mailing lists did this a year or two ago, adding a limit of 30 posts per person per month. Not sure it's had any significant impact on the community, but it has somewhat reduced the volume of a few really, really prolific posters, which is a slight improvement to the S:N ratio. (There exist mailing lists where the most prolific posters are also good contributors, but imo this is not true of the…
Interesting! I would rather use a one per day limit instead of 30 per month - this would force people to think another 24 hours about their reply and that could improve it :)