@jessamyn@codinghorror Stack eventually started to improve on its hostility to newbies, but not quickly enough. Ultimately, moderators wrongly decided that it was impossible to have reliable, reference-quality information without also being condescending or patronizing to new coders, and the community suffered deeply for it. They could simply have come up with norms for routing & directing new users, instead of scolding & demaning those who didn’t yet know the norms.
@codinghorror@anildash SO's average moderator is more polite than Wikipedia's average Talk page denizen imo, to be fair.
SO is just like a lot of older web communities, there are people who have been there for a long time and they have varying levels of tolerance for newbies. MetaFilter is no different. It just turns out that people like talking to no-judgment robots more than many of us expected. (I was just editing the WP page for Replika and some of the science around that is wild)
@jessamyn@anildash elimination of repetition is a good thing, not a bad thing. Also, people have quirks. Wikipedia would not exist if its editing/talk/meta UI was not completely inscrutable to 99.999% of the people on this planet.
@Raffzahn@jessamyn@codinghorror I’m well aware of what the failure states were. But knowing that these problems arose constantly, I also think mods too often took satisfaction in being unkind to people whose first experience of the community would then be encountering rank hostility from the most-tenured members of the site. They could have tried to actually solve the core issues with empathy instead of lashing out at inexperienced coders.
@jessamyn@codinghorror@anildash I gets hard to show an exceptional level of tolerance when 'questions' are posted where simply entering the title into the search field would reveal it being already answered. Or Newbs trying to rule lawyer why their off topic question is of course valid. Or most common: people complaining that an answer does not support what they wanted to hear.
So yeah, once one has spend some time on any SE site tolerance gets strained.