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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users?
Slashdot reader dryriver writes:
I've noticed a disturbing trend while trying to resolve a rather tricky tech issue by asking questions on a number of internet forums. The number of people who don't help at all with problems but rather butt into threads with unhelpful comments like "Why would you want to do that in the first place?" or "why don't you look at X poorly written documentation page " was staggering. One forum user with 1,500+ posts even posted "you are such a n00b if you can't figure this out" in my question thread, even though my tech question wasn't one that is obvious or easy to resolve...
I seem to remember a time when people helped each other far more readily on the internet. Now there seems to be a new breed of forum user who a) hangs out at a forum socially all day b) does not bother to help at all and c) gets a kick out of telling you things like "what a stupid question" or "nobody will help you with that here" or similar... Where have the good old days gone when people much more readily gave other people step-by-step tips, tricks, instructions and advice?
The original submission claims the ratio of unhelpful comments to helpful ones was 5 to 1. Has anyone else experienced this? And if so, what's the best response? Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you deal with aggressive forum users?
I seem to remember a time when people helped each other far more readily on the internet. Now there seems to be a new breed of forum user who a) hangs out at a forum socially all day b) does not bother to help at all and c) gets a kick out of telling you things like "what a stupid question" or "nobody will help you with that here" or similar... Where have the good old days gone when people much more readily gave other people step-by-step tips, tricks, instructions and advice?
The original submission claims the ratio of unhelpful comments to helpful ones was 5 to 1. Has anyone else experienced this? And if so, what's the best response? Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you deal with aggressive forum users?
You're asking HERE?
Nothing requires you to do anything about them; just treat them as meaningless noise, and act the same as you would have acted if their unhelpful post did not exist.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I have to wonder whether asking this on /. counts as a sort of metatroll ...
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
Honestly, if there's a stack exchange site (for instance, stackoverflow.com for programming questions) for it, I ask there - the Q&A focused design is far from perfect, but the 'attitude' answers don't last long, and are removed pretty quickly.
It's got other problems of course, but for this particular problem, the Stack Exchange model works pretty well at keeping the stupid and useless answers to a lower level than other sites.
Beyond that, you've got to search out communities that aren't full of jerks and a-holes. Sadly, there's at least one in every crowd, but some communities are better at ejecting bad actors than others.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
You're asking HERE?
I'll second that.
It might be because nice people tend to lose patience and go away, so that the forums have nothing but griefers left.
Lots of forums are completely toxic in this regard, and Slashdot has fallen prey to this as well. Post a non-insulting position about something that doesn't jibe with the group-think and you'll get nothing but insults. No thought put into it, almost a boiler-plate "you're really stupid" or "you're a racist".
Try to contribute to Slashdot by submitting articles, and the toxic users will mod them as spam and get your account locked.
They seem to think that any tactic in support of their end goals is OK, and they don't see the value of well-formed alternate opinions, and reasoned discourse. All they see is that opposition seems to be less over time.
They view it as "winning" when reasonable people lose patience with the griefers and leave.
What's left is the toxic residue.
.... but, what I would do is just ignore, as others have already stated.
If I ran a list/forum, I would specifically state in the Terms that 'newbie' questions should be expected, and any condescending responses would result in immediate suspension. If users don't have anything helpful to respond with, they shouldn't bother responding.
AC comments get piped to
It's been like that since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990's, and even when the Internet was opened up to Universities before going mainstream. The overall proportion of useless forum idiots has probably stayed relatively constant for the last 20+ years (and probably even before Web forums overtook Usenet).
The problem probably seems worse now because the Internet population is much larger than it was back then, making the absolute numbers larger; but the ratio of idiots to the entire population is probably in the same ballpark as back then.
The answer has always been the same: you must ignore them, and don't feed the trolls. At least on Usenet, we had the twit filter that would allow us to list the people we wanted to automatically ignore.
Just avoid the python groups, and you'll avoid the spots where most of these sorts of people hang out.
In a more serious vein, I haven't seen this happening excessively. I've spent a good deal of time on a large number of forums and irc channels, and by and large, this doesn't seem to be happening frequently in the way you describe. I'm not saying that you haven't experienced this, it's just that in the last 20 years, there haven't been a lot of know-nothing folks just spamming "you suck noob" to any given question.
I can guess why; in any technical discussion it quickly becomes apparent who does and does not know what they're talking about. In fact, many quickly devolve into a special-case-knowledge comparison contest. The unhelpful person is ignored or derided by the masses as a whole. They quickly leave. That's why they're just not around.
That being said, what I have seen is people asking other people to do their work for them, including but not limited to: easily googleable questions, questions specified explicitly by documentation, questions that require more information to answer than is given, questions that could easily be answered by trying it out in a test, and so on. 95% of the time, these folks are inexperienced in technical forums as a whole, and don't understand that they're being lazy and trying to shift work they could easily do onto others because of it.
This is irritating, especially in channels of 300+ people with new folks jumping in and asking a single question and popping out, never to contribute, once every 2-3 minutes. Especially when many of them appear to be homework.
The best option for these folks is to ask them to read http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , especially the whole of http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , before asking another question.
Some forums are completely toxic. Fuck reddit.....
On the other hand, read the stickies, use the search, and for fucks sake, RTFM before you ask for help.
You are either
1.) On the wrong forum.
2.) posting off topic.
3.) not trying hard enough to "self help"
4.) Ignoring the 'READ THIS FIRST" thread.
5.) Fucking retarded.
Sometimes, the problem is you. Tough love. Not trying to be an asshole, but ther sheer number of people who can't seem to follow simple directions is staggering.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I wish I could mod you up. :)
The problem is the people who own the site(s) and not the users. Treat your site like your living room - do not tolerate people who piss on your living room floor. Bounce them out, clean up and apologise to your other guests.
One forum I have helped moderate had a number of moderator tools:
1) You could edit any post. Often some flamebait line comes as a single line at the end of an otherwise reasonable post. You can just edit out the flame and send them a message explaining that they should be more respectful of other forum members.
2) You could delete a message. Some messages were just pure troll or flame, again you can just delete them and explain to them why it was removed. Then they can argue with privately instead of in the forum where it annoys everyone.
3) Temp ban. We also had the option to ban a user for a few days. That was great because someone who just was really hot and kept posting sometimes would be perfectly fine with a few days to cool off. Lots of people know when they are unreasonable and are fine after some correction, then they are productive forum members.
4) Remove. Sometimes people are just so grating, that really there is no option for the well-being of others other than to remove them. Sure they can register under other usernames and come back, but often these people have such distinctive writing styles that a moderator can recognize them right away and just ban new users with a similar stye or message.
In general I would say, as a moderator you should give more leeway to people who have been on a forum for a while, but brook no nonsense with new members or repeat violators. Moderation is inherently a grey area anyway, so every action is a judgement call... it's best if you can have a few moderators so they can discuss options amongst them and come to a reasonable solution.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In spite of the horribly rude tone, there's a hint of truth to that. A big reason why people get snarky is because so many people don't even bother to try to figure things out before they ask for help. A sizable percentage of people seem to be completely helpless when anything goes wrong. They don't know how to do a Google search, they don't know how to read for comprehension, and they don't know how to figure out what things to look for when skimming/searching documentation for solutions to their problems. This lack of critical thinking skills is quite alarming.
As a result, even those of us who still try to help tend to point people to the right piece of documentation first, waiting to re-explain things until after they come back and say that they still don't understand something. And after a few rounds, even I have to say, "Read the doc and figure it out." After all, my job is not to write your code for you. I'll try to help, and I'll try to steer you in the right direction, but there are limits.
Cynically, I place the blame for these problems squarely at the feet of Apple for trying to dumb down programming, technical documentation, computer use, etc. to the point where people don't have to think to code, rather than saying, "You must be this tall to ride the ride." The result is a bunch of people who don't bother to think and who expect others to do the thinking for them. They've bred a whole class of "duh-velopers" who literally can't do much more than piece together code snippets and tweak them slightly. Heaven help them if a snippet contains something like "insert your customization here", because they go slack-jawed. And this results in everybody who actually understands what's going on having to waste a lot of time explaining things that should have been obvious.
IMO, you can't fix one problem without fixing both. People are jerks because the newbies have driven all the nice people away by incessantly asking questions whose answers should be obvious to anybody who actually read and comprehended the docs, and most of the people who didn't comprehend the docs are still not going to understand it no matter how many times you explain it. Fix the clueless question problem, and people who are able to actually figure out what they're doing will stick around and will continue to be helpful. Short of that, nothing will help in the long run.
To some degree, that is probably best solved by reputation-bssed segregation. Anybody should be able to answer any questions, but until you get rep, your questions should be initially seen only by other newbies (and if no newbie can answer them, they would then bubble up to folks with more rep). Rep should be awarded for asking good questions or giving good answers. Clueless people who are incapable of asking good questions and giving good answers should thus remain stuck in the newbie question cesspool while the adults discuss real issues.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Rule #1: You cannot win.
Rule #2: The only way to not lose is to not play.
Rule #3: There is no Rule #3.
Ignore them. Any other action is encouraging them.
Aggressive forum users are a sign of the failure of the moderators. You'll see that on commenting systems where there is peer moderation (like on slashdot) or very relaxed, almost non existent moderation such as youtube aggressive forum users are never really a problem. On youtube where moderation is non existent, users know not to make aggressive, provoking posts because they know that the reply they get back will be 2x as aggressive and nothing will be held back, plus the aggressive forum will be rediculed by the rest of the forum commenters discouraging them from a repeat offence.
On a forum where there is active moderation but the moderator takes a favorable/ignorant stance on aggressive users, this leads to a really bad culture on the board because nothing is really done about the said aggressive forum user and it just kills serious threads and drives legitimate commenters off. Once the aggressive user knows he can get away with belittling and being rude to others he continues it in other threads because he knows the moderators will do little if anything about it.
Unfortunately there is nothing you can really do about aggressive users like that because it is moderators failing to do their job/doing a half assed effort at it and if you complain they will take action on you instead of on the perpetrator. In some ways I think some moderators even LIKE having aggressive users around because they lighten the load on the moderators by killing off discussions and driving off people so there is less for them to moderate/reply to in threads.
Examples of failing forums:
IMDB forums. I am not surprised the IMDB forums are shutting down. IMDB is owned by Amazon and their forums are a disgrace, filled with trolls and the moderators do a extremely poor job about it.
The Steam "Help and Tips", and "Suggestion/Ideas" forums. Just like the OP describes, when people ask for genuine help they get shitposts. When they make a suggestion they get replies to the line of "Why would you want to do that in the first place" or the vanilla response that the suggested idea will only help griefers/phishers/spammers, ignoringthe fact that they are acting like griefers themselves with their responses. It's like the MPAA trying to curb copyright infringement by using the keywords like "funding terrorism". They can't just reply to someone civily, they have to be insultive and negative to the person they are replying to. It is this sort of negativity that ruins discussions by serial discussion killers such as Start_running http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198043285599, Satoru http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970218004 and Zetikla http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198001062896
In the Doom board someone asked for a Linux port and the windows trolls swooped in:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/357286119106149442/ . The moderators did nothing about it.
I know that this post now is going to attract all sorts of trolls but the posts I'm talking about people write genuine lengthy on topic posts that have nothing to do with other users and they get attacked/griefed for it. That is what I am talking about that drives forum contributers off and stonewalls discussions.It is a big problem on discussion boards where the moderators are poor at doing their job. If they can;t moderate then they should let the users as a whole do it for them like on slashdot.
Aggressive forum users are a sign of the failure of the moderators.
The specific behaviour the OP describes is more a sign of the type of forum they're participating in, it's, unfortunately, fairly common behaviour among geek/techie personalities. Go to a forum dealing with, say, gardening or pets or childcare and you'll very rarely see this sort of thing, the standard response there is sympathy and advice. So the best advice perhaps is to hold your nose and ignore the crap, or try posting to several different technical forums in the hope that you'll get good advice from at least one of them.
Moderation, I agree, is one way of dealing with this, e.g. Stackexchange does a pretty good job of keeping things on-topic, but sometimes you just have to mentally lint-filter the crap in the hope of finding the nuggets of good advice.
Go to a forum dealing with, say, gardening or pets or childcare and you'll very rarely see this sort of thing, the standard response there is sympathy and advice.
I disagree.
I frequent a large parenting forum.
The bitterness and disdain for others I see there is unseen in the "techie" world. Newbie questions get not only mocked, but attacked on personal level and with psychological finesse that only comes with practice. The responders know that new parents are uncertain in their parenting skills and they attack this condition with precision. "What kind of parent could ask a question like this?" "MY child does ALWAYS obey the rules we have set. What mistakes must you have done for your kids to not obey yours?" etc etc.
The people on the parenting forum seem like Putin's trolls in training for me. They practice psychological forum-warfare, trying to identify the weak spots in other participants. People who come for advice in parenting MUST have the weak spots (otherwise they would not seek help in the first place) and thus provide a good training ground.
Thus this behaviour is universal to the 'net, not limited to "techie forums".
The specific behaviour the OP describes is more a sign of the type of forum they're participating in, it's, unfortunately, fairly common behaviour among geek/techie personalities. Go to a forum dealing with, say, gardening or pets or childcare and you'll very rarely see this sort of thing, the standard response there is sympathy and advice.
Yes and no. I have sympathy with both sides and I'm about to write an ill structured post, blathering my thoughts all over the place. With that out of the way...
Thing is, on those gardening forums, you're generally asking for free help from people who are world experts, very busy (the forum covers work too) and can command $2000 a day consulting fees. Tahe for example, Theo De Raadt. He is one hellofa smart guy and leads an absolutely world class operating system (one which incidentally seems to be plagued with freeloaders---how many megacorps rely on openssh and contribute basically nothing) on remarkably small funds. The forums/mailing lists aren't a social gathering, they're very much work, but work that happens to be visible and in theory accessible to all.
In a very real sense, butting into those forums, interrupting busy professionals doing work and asking for unpaid help when you can't be bothered to do the research is the height of rudeness. Someone telling you to "fuck off" is less rude. I have actually had the pleasure of conversing with Mr De Raadt on the mailing list. I was doing a "you probably shouldn't be doing this" kind of thing, but I probably spent 4 extra hours researching after deciding to write a post, reading the man pages, browsing the source and forum posts, to make sure I wasn't taking the piss. I actually learned a bunch more doing that and so was able to go in at a deeper level.
Theo himself weighed in on the thread after a few posts. He was polite, and helpful and it was an overall excellent experience. But I didn't ask a very busy, very overworked person to stop work and help me for free so I don't have to think myself.
On the other hand...
I don't tend to respond like that (yet?). I can command reasonable consulting fees in my area and I get massively n00bish questions from people trying to use my C++ library which makes it clear they're only passingly familiar with a C++ compiler and can't even answer basic questions like "what compiler are you using". But I'm not famous and my code isn't anything like as popular as OpenBSD, so while those are a relatively high proportion of questions, they are reasonably rare.
I am getting slightly annoyed by them though. I imagine if it was daily (or more) then my patience would have worn very thin by now.
But it goes all the way down. N00b questions on a n00b forum are fine. Actually n00b questions on any forum are fine, provided the n00b in question (and we are all n00bs) are not entitled. But after a couple of years of answering question from people who want a quick fix or their homework solved, I think people get really, really jaded and worn. At that point they tend to see bad behaviour even when there is none. For example, misunderstanding a question, then attacking based on that BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER FUCKING HOMEWORK QUESTION JUST FUCK OFF!!11!1one etc.
But they, don't want to leave the forum because there are also the good tech bits.
Oh and of course some people are simply raging assholes who believe that unpleasantness is a substitute for quality (or hides a lack of it), or just like to shit on others to make themselves feel good. The trouble is the aggressiveness from the competent, but deeply jaded people allows the assholeishness from the incompetent to flourish.
But bear in mind that it is assholey to ask a world expert for help when 10 minutes of googling would have solved the problem. Also bear in mind that we all have days where somehow we miss blindingly obvious answers.
Basically there are assholes on both sides, and there's a lot of jadedness.
I have no idea what the solution is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
While it is a fairly common problem on tech forums, it might have something to do with the large number of people that we get to deal with who have no interest in learning, want us to solve all of their problems, and (very important) consider us to be sub-humans incapable of human interaction or emotion for the rest of their time. Technical people get to deal with lots of non-technical people who have technical problems, and who have zero appreciation for our efforts or our very existence other than as a way to solve their probems. This is definitely different from gardening or pets: the people asking questions there are already part of the community themselves, and don't look down on the people they expect to solve their problems.
There are other problems too: far too many students asking for help with homework (and always the same homework too! "Implement a linked list", how original). Too many people apparently completely unaware of how to use the search function of the forum. Too many people who just cannot bother to read. Too many people who get the help they want, but completely forget to post a "thank you" (or accept your answer, in the case of Stackoverflow).
Having said all that, yes, tech forums tend to be toxic. Entirely too many postings start or end with a sneer ("Are you a moron?", or "You must be Trump", for example). It doesn't add anything, it only increases hostility, so why add it?
As for Stackoverflow(/Stackexchange), it's no exception, really. I tried to help people in the C++ forum for a while - until I had a few of my answers modded to -5 (really bad) and then saw the same answer posted verbatim by another poster with a score a hundred times mine, who promptly received +30 or more for it. Suffice it to say, I stopped posting there.