That doesn’t apply to Linux communities on Lemmy though, but I meet a lot of Linux communities, that are toxic and beginner-unfriendly. People, who have voluntarily decided to maintain a community, behave like I broke into their house at 3 AM with my questions. If I ask a question, there will be a 20% chance to get any relevant response, but a 100% chance of being nagged with some bullshit. It especially applies to the behaviour of mods. For instance, a dude was messing with me because I have searched for a binary on the official internet database, instead of quering it via package manager.
I wish I could just avoid junkyards like that, but I can’t: I haven’t found another active community for Void Linux.
As far as I can tell from my experience, it is something specific to Linux or IT communities.
So why is it like this?
Imagine every day I ask you what the color of the sky is. There are a bunch of forum threads that tell me the sky color, there is a wiki with sky color information, and the search can give me the sky colour. I have all the information I need to work out the sky color, but I still keep asking you.
That is what these communities often deal with, it grinds you down and gives you have a short fuse.
Why bother even engaging though. There will always be those repeats it’s inevitable. It’s just because people still want an excuse to dunk. Just ignore and the poster will figure it out themselves, the whole point of posting instead of searching first is laziness.
Whether you engage or not, its a constant noise that has to be dealt with.
Then the settings for sky color are not there.
I think most newbies would rather find the answer themselves in the wiki or old forum threads, but that’s often difficult if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for.
Running with your example, let’s say I’m trying to find out the color of the sky but don’t know it’s called sky. And to make it worse, right now it’s covered by some kind of gray mass… Is that perhaps The Cloud I’ve heard people talking about? I would Google something like “huge thing above color” but unsurprisingly I wouldn’t end up on your wiki. So I end up asking the question on the forums instead.
I used to work in IT support, where 95% of the questions were about things that were already comprehensively documented if people would just read. Instead of yelling at customers for asking dumb questions, we had response templates we could send with just a single click.
I don’t understand why communities overwhelmed by repeat questions don’t do something similar. The next time someone asks about the sky color, it would take just one click to reply politely with a link to that wiki article and everyone would be happy.
What’s funny is OP’s question always makes it to these wikis and forums too. So even the “why are Linux users so mean?” gripe has been surgically analyzed over and over.
I mean I’ve heard it in other places with about the same answer.
The same thing happens in trans communities, but the answer isn’t for the old guard to try and handle everything themselves, burn out and then shut down newbies that are looking for community and help.
The answer is for the crusty old guard to create the space and keep the worst offenders out, whilst letting the people that aren’t burnt out support each other and keep the community thriving.
Sometimes that means letting common questions be common, because if you’ve got a positive community, someone will always be there with an answer and a link to an even more detailed resource.
If the newbies don’t stick around to contribute back, then that doesn’t work well. The trans community (at least from an outsiders perspective) seem a lot more close-knit, so it probably works better?
For technical communities, it doesn’t seem like the communal support exists to the same degree. Newbies come in, get their answer and leave. :(
Most people lose interest. You have to help a lot to get a person who is going to help others in the future.
I guess because an answer to a technical question doesn’t affect someone’s whole life.
I’ll always be in debt to the Trans community here on Lemmy because of how they helped me, even though I’m not a member of the community.
This is a good answer I will say I wish people that ask simple questions would just ask for a one one chat. Since its not really about the questions getting answered. Its about getting conference and connection with the community. I help out on the Debian IRC and 80% of the tine. They are just excited about joining the community and want a little moral support when they make the jump.
…there’s an IRC??? How do I go about accessing it?
I had no idea chatrooms still existed.
https://www.oftc.net/
There are even ones dedicated to getting ebooks
This is the answer. Theres only so many times someone can ask the same question as the person yesterday and the person the day before that before it gets old.
Its makes you want to scream “please do even the bare minimum amount of research or googling instead of treating the forum/community/whatever like chat gpt!”
it also drowns out more useful questions and PSA/comments people make. Someone who is actually having a niche issue can more readily get help, someone who figured out how to fix it can post about it in the right threads.
If I had a penny for every time my Google search took me to a result telling somebody to Google it…
The “answers” you get are either someone telling you that question has been asked before, someone using a lot of words while not answering the question, or “oh, I figured it out, never mind.”
Not for the questions that get asked repeatedly. You don’t tell people to just look it up unless you’ve already answered that same question at least ten times in the recent past. If you’ve already answered it multiple times, then the answer is out there.