How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
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How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#2Wow, I thought I was just being shy, but I've been adhering to a similar strategy my whole life when joining a new group: stay back, let the group welcome you in instead of forcing yourself into the group.
I also find that befriending single members of the group outside of the normal group environment works well in gaining some legitimacy in the group. After friending one person, you just apply the transitive property of friendship a couple time and hey! you've got a ton of new friends.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#3The basic point seems to be "if you're new, shut up". Probably good advice in most cases.
Perhaps the headline could be changed to "How Groups Perceive Criticism From Newcomers" - I was expecting an article about how a group changes based on an influx of newcomers, which has been a topic of interest on HN lately.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#4I think it is perfectly reasonable to take criticism
from an 18 year veteran more seriously than from a
2 week new jack.
In both cases you are assuming to gain a new perspective from the experience of another human.. Is it not reasonable to assume that someone that has spent a vast quantity of time in a particular environment would have a better perspective than a new jack?
And, do we need a study to tell us that groups are hostile toward newcomers that give them criticism?
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#5I'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.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#6I think it is perfectly reasonable to take criticism from an 18 year veteran more seriously than from a 2 week new jack. In both cases you are assuming to gain a new perspective from the experience of another human.. Is it not reasonable to assume that someone that has spent a vast quantity of time in a particular environment would have a better perspective than a new jack? And, do we need a study to tell us that gro…
But that was not the group reaction. The article indicated that the group...
thought newcomers provided less constructive criticism
agreed less with newcomers' suggestions
were more negative about their criticisms
If the group just wasn't taking the criticism seriously, they would ignore it rather than disagree with it.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#7I don't see why you would want to change anything as a newcomer. There's no way you are going to understand the process well enough by then. First get to know the people, figure out how they think, how they work and how they communicate. Then figure out what's wrong and start telling them about it. You have nothing important to tell in the first few weeks. Ignoring your criticism is the rational thing to do.
At a lower level the way to get change done is to agree with people on anything you find sufficiently unimportant. On the thing you really want to change you'll explain that it's really quite similar to what they've been doing before, except you start taking into account A, which should be something they can identify with. To be able to do this, you need to know who you're talking to.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#8I'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.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#9I'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.
Re: How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups
#10I'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.
> I just can't imagine people loving nuclear weapons and such so why vote me down for speaking out in favor of pacifism.
Because HN doesn't reward cluelessness even if it is riding a unicorn. Spouting false choices, attributing strawmen, and self-righteousness doesn't help.