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?
I don’t think it’s Linux-specific. There’s a lot of dickheads in society. If you create a community around a particular topic or hobby, then most likely you’ll get people there feeling arrogant/superior about their skills in that hobby/topic/etc and wanting to gatekeep it. It happens for a lot of things.
There are some communities that are made which aren’t made for beginners. They are made for in depth fans who want to have conversations deeper than helping new people getting into whatever. Moreso, if they haven’t hit an Eternal September event, then new people have to adapt to the old culture rather than the other way around.
I imagine that Linux is esoteric enough and picks various platforms which keeps an Eternal September from happening. Because of that, they aren’t going to bend to new users like other online communities are forced to.
There’s a group of people who have a hard time seeing the perspective of newbies and unfortunately that group overlap heavily with hardcore nerds. For whatever reason, hardcore nerds are generally bad at UX and generally bad at moderation. It’s sad.
Hopefully this will change as the hardcore nerds become a smaller portion of the user base and more regular people start using Linux.
I have not noticed much toxicity in the linux communities but im not exactly new to it. Personally one thing I have mentioned when talking about people moving to linux is that many things now have a debian distro download option next to the windows and mac. Most linux systems will use it to bring up the gui of the package manager. I am kinda glad I used unix systems enough before they got so simple as it is nice to have the command line options. they are not necessary though. My only thing is if someone is going to use linux like windows you have to be at a level where you could install windows and then if your not going to be looking to learn much you want to grab an out of the box distro.
Because they are annoyed. Imagine getting asked the same thing ten times over and then again, especially when said thing could be easily googled or resolved by reading the manuals.
because OS nerds were the original gatekeepers of the internet. they were gate keepers prior to game forums when the internet was still new. It’s like waking a vampire that is 9000 yrs old and looks more bat than human and all it knows how to do is screech and hiss.
cause of the gatekeepers
It’s not a Linux thing at all. I have a lot of different hobby interests and I find gatekeeping everywhere. I don’t even think it’s limited to hobbies. Gatekeeping seems to be a natural human social behaviour.
Idk about that. Every time I’m on an Amateur Radio board even the newest most repeated question is often answerd earnestly by multiple people often with enthusiasm and quality. If a community actually recognizes and accepts that they want to onboard new people, they don’t treat new people like burdens.
I see that as essentially having a community norm against gatekeeping. It’s not a feature of every community and it needs to be intentionally maintained. Gatekeeping in that light is a kind of Hobbesian state of nature behaviour that is being deliberately policed.
There’s so much denial here. Linux users even have their own pidgin for being toxic. “your fault: wrong distro”, “pebkac”, “skill issue”, “works fine on MY system” (same models can have different sound, wifi, and bluetooth chips). They can’t even get along with each other when different distros, init systems, display servers, etc., are discussed.
Sure, it goes on elsewhere: in Religion and Politics which is why both are banned from discussion in many bars/pubs.
I think you misunderstood me. I’m not saying that gatekeeping doesn’t exist in Linux communities. It absolutely does, and I wouldn’t quibble if you said Linux was rife with gatekeeping.
What I’m saying is that gatekeeping isn’t unique to Linux in any way. Gatekeeping is everywhere, and I argue that it’s a default social behaviour that arises in communities above a certain size, unless specifically guarded against through community norms.
Some people forget what it was like when they were starting out. They find it difficult to remember when they learned what they know now because it feels like they’ve always known it, like it was and is second nature.
It doesn’t help if they were able, either through circumstances, zeitgeist or sheer aptitude, to pick up a topic relatively easily right back when they did first learn it.
And so it can be difficult for such people (or at the very least, some of them) to see that anyone else might, for whatever reason, be having a hard time picking up the same thing in <current year>.
Combine that with toxic personality traits and you can end up with an embittered person unloading on you for not being able to do what they consider to be a simple thing.
These people are a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of everyone relevant, but they do make a heck of a lot of noise when they’re unloading, and they often gravitate towards each other, so they seem like they make up more of a group than they really do when you finally run across them.
Note that at no point yet have I mentioned Linux. This is a human problem that affects all topics and activities.
If you want to get into the peculiarities of why it seems to be more common with technical communities, it might have something to do with the fact that people who don’t feel particularly confident dealing with other people often chose to deal with something else instead.
Computers and other mechanical things offer stimulating complexity without any of that human nonsense.
This can lead to poor interpersonal skills perpetuating themselves or festering. And so you end up with a few of the aforementioned misanthropes trying to control what they know how to control and lashing out at everything, or everyone, else.
Easy solution:
1: Make a post asking your question.
2: Switch to a different alt account and make a reply giving an obviously wrong solution to your question.
Your sock-puppet reply will attract all the negativity, and the answers painstakingly pointing out why it’s wrong will give you the correct answer.
Sort of similar is people that make posts on social media, some purposefully make a wrong comment in the title to foster engagement, and it works, people will come on to correct the OP and it will get bumped up on the algorithm.
You don’t need a sok puppet–just ask if a really boneheaded solution would work or give a comically bad diagnosis of the problem.
People’s need to be right is greater than their need to help anyone. The hope is that they’re helpful along the way to being right.
The genious
For me, it has a lot to do with fatigue.
When I started interacting with people on those kinds of forums, I tried to be genuinely helpful, like most of us.
When you see the same question asked over and over and over, when you see the same flame wars happening over and over and over, there are two paths in the long term. You either stop interacting on a regular basis and only react to interesting questions because you are tired of repeating the same arguments, or you gleefully dive in the cesspool and become a toxic bastard.
It’s especially hard to keep having a nuanced debate when the comments are flooded with people who are confidently wrong (eg recommending an advanced or niche distro, or even worse, Ubuntu to a beginner), extremely opinionated users (the anti-systemd or anti-Wayland crowd) and so on. You just end up being lost in a sea of comments and unheard. So why bother? Let the flame wars rage and move on.
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.
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.
Back, in good ol’ days (5 years ago, or so), if you were a software developer you could ask any question on Stackoverflow, by any, I mean any question worthy of time of other users. If your question was considered too easy you would meet multiple beginner unfriendly answers. The portal is probably dead right now, I didn’t bother checking. It was killed by the AI since it will answer any of your simple questions and praise it instead of telling you that you should read the manual. AI is often wrong, but it helps a lot with the issues that most Linux geeks would consider unworthy of their time.
In the Linux community, it’s mostly the people who are developing the software who are also supporting the forums. To them, the forums are a way of communicating with others who are also working on improving the software. So at the end of the day, to them the forums are doing their job when people are contributing new content and ideas and making their lives easier.
Unfortunately, people new to the forums are going to be there to get assistance, asking questions about the stuff these people documented specifically so nobody would have to take them away from creating neat new things to hand hold them through using the older things. And most of these people aren’t technical writers or even communicators.
If you were somehow in a forum with a bunch of Windows, Android or macOS developers, you’d probably find the same level of toxic before long.
Because it’s not about you. It’s that you’re following the same learning curve of hundreds of others before you, and it causes these people to have to repeatedly stop what brings them joy to explain the same thing to yet another person. Or, you’ve got a new question. THAT means that nobody likely has the answer, and somebody needs to figure it out and then document it and then point you at the documentation, instead of doing what they want to be doing in their limited free time.
The Linux communities that aren’t like this tend to be small, or have a large education contingent, or are privately funded and so have professional communicators managing the forums.
Everywhere on the Internet at all levels can be toxic. Period.
Yes, but some linux communities are like andrew tate levels of toxic. But instead of hating women, they hate people who don’t know linux.
It would be like andrew tate starting a womens support group, but then still acting like andrew tate. The women coming out of that support group would be confused and bewildered by why people voluntarily choose this.
I remember my first time learning linux existed was in 2005. I posted a message, with zero knowledge at all about linux, and asked what people like about linux. I was trying to decide if I even liked the concept of a non-windows OS.
The first person who replied, said “WE LIKE LINUX BECAUSE WE FUCK YOUR MOM BITCH!!!”
Cool.
And I didn’t try linux that day.
Yes, but some linux communities are like andrew tate levels of toxic. But instead of hating women, they hate people who don’t know linux.
I hear this a lot, but honestly … I’ve never seen it.
You may get a bit of snark for asking a really stupid question that google could easily answer, and maybe there’s some highly downvoted comment in the bottom giving you shit no matter what … but I’ve never seen a Linux community where the majority of the replies would be toxic, much less that toxic.
I think your 3rd paragraph perfectly demonstrates the underlying issue, the “posted a message, with zero knowledge at all of linux” part.
People learn differently, and have different approaches to learning something new. Some people prefer to ask for input, advice, or opinions from other people they belive to be more knowledgeable. Others prefer to read and absorb as much information as they can to get a solid foundation, and only reach out to others when the information they need is not readily available, or their issue is nuanced and specific.
Neither approach is right or wrong, they’re just different, because people are different. The former view the the latters as being toxic, and the latters view the formers as being lazy. Linux and more technical communities with more of a learning curve typically are made up of the latter.
Disclaimer: not defending, excusing, justifying, just 1 persons lived experience, grain of salt yata yata
