I am searching and reading old posts trying to learn as much as possible from this forum. All the information here is amazing and the discussions very interesting.
What I noticed is that some wisdom beasts deleted or suspended their accounts. I find this very sad.
What do you think are the reasons that those people leave the forum? Does it have something to do with the kind of moderation? Or are they so passionate about what they do that they do not accept a second opinion?
At the end, in my opinion, would be very nice to have those wisdom beasts back here!
Some asked to be anonimized, some were forcefully anonimized, some just locked out of their account forever. Discussing specific people does not seem appropriate.
Civility is something we require, and many who have much knowledge seem to lack the will or ability to communicate like an empathetic human being. Those people are not welcome here.
I have to say that on the darktable forum I have more than once felt like giving up on it since some of the replies and pettiness from some people is simply rude and uncalled for. I have not experienced that here.
I would not say many but some. A polite and constructive tone is not a question of expertise. However, everyone here should check themselves and give an example of appreciative interaction in every post. It is not helpful to see the blame only on a few. We can all together improve the communication here in the forum. With a few exceptions, I find the tone on pixls.us very pleasant.
Whatever the reason, the content is still available, though perhaps harder to discover—unless the user deleted their posts.
I have made referrals for users to the departed where appropriate, so it isn’t as if I don’t value their expertise.
I would say there is no use inviting people back. They either left on their own accord or don’t fit in this community. If they want to come back, they will on their own. I believe our staff and mods will welcome them as long as they are civil and willing to collaborate.
I would like to add one more thing of utmost importance because of its value. It is this:
Apologize when you have wronged someone, whether you feel like it or not. This posture of humility will go a long way to building a community everyone will enjoy.
I dislike people being critical of the work that some developers put in. We might like to sometimes do it differently, but unless we are willing to do the coding ourselves we should be grateful for all the work the volunteer developers have put in. They do a great job and bring novel approaches to photo editing. I wish I had the ability to code and contribute to this great project.
I’m not a developer, but I wrote a bit of C (and a couple of other languages) many years ago. I may be wrong, but I suspect the coding is the relatively easier – if more lengthy – part compared to the math and color science aspects. Then again I’m sure I’m biased by my difficulties with math…
I’ve been thinking about this more lately myself. Let me preface this by saying I am idiot in many fields. No one should listen to me on for any reason. I don’t mean to tell the mods how to do their job, this is just some thoughts I have.
We have a similar issue at work. I work for state entity where it’s really hard to fire someone unless they are outright malicious. As one of the very bright student employees I work with told me “I’d never want to work here full time, you guys have a deep incompetence problem due to the “be personable and show up” model and I’ll get very frustrated very quickly at that.” He’s not wrong, we have many people who would have been fired years ago in private industry. They’re nice people but just awful at what they do. Take to long to do tasks and frankly probably aren’t bright enough or have the background to do the work. The latter will become more and more of a problem as everything becomes more technical, I think we’re going to have an increasing bar on “smart enough to be useful” for humans in the coming decades but that’s another discussion entirely. I’m not innocent of this and have my limits too and I’m not sure if I’ve hit the Peter principle myself yet or not. We do have a hard time hanging on the really talented people and I suspect frustration at having to deal with the slower ones in the group among other things.
That brings me around to this forum. I’ve said in the past that being intelligent is not an excuse for being a jerk and I still stand by that. But likewise I think we need to think about how being personable and kind is not a compensation for being unread or maybe not intellectually up to level needed to participate in some things. This could be from lack of education or maybe you’re just not cut out for discussions on deep color theory or whatever.
If the environment here is causing these so-called wisdom beasts to leave in such numbers perhaps it needs examining. Maybe instead of enforcing “be nice at all costs” to the point where the intelligent, knowledgeable folks are frustrated and telling people to go f*** themselves and leaving we need to meet in the middle and start kicking people who are wasting their time. Not everyone opinions or thoughts are equal, you should ban me 100x over before kicking AP. Just because I’m “nice” doesn’t mean I need be allowed to try and discuss what I’m sure is first grade level stuff with him and waste his time.
Again I think there is room for compromise here. It doesn’t have to be a hard ban or anything just “this thread requires a certain level of expertise in X field, if you participate and clearly don’t know what you’re talking about it will result in a 5 day ban” or something. Have “stupid questions” threads for the rest of us but let the wisdom beasts have their space to talk on their level too. The smart folks can avoid us morons and still venture in their when they feel up to it, us morons can read the technical threads and try to understand but don’t waste their time/frustrate them with “I dunno man I don’t think this is right.” I think I’ve been guilty of that myself and if I contributed to running off a more knowledgeable person by being a dumbass I sincerely regret my involvement in that.
I’m not sure and it really depends on the goals of the admins and mods of a place. But I do think if we’re driving away the best and brightest among us there needs to be a rethink of how things are done. Even if it’s just “not all opinions and thoughts are created equal, if you try to stand toe-to-toe with someone who clearly has 10X the expertise of you you will be warned/banned/etc.”
Just to re-iterate here, AP was not kicked or banned, though some of his posts were flagged by other forum users. It seems to me like there is a pretty high bar for kicking, banning, or suspending people here, and it requires repeated and intentional infringements after multiple warnings.
My example above was opposite to your description. A self identifying smart person and dev who behaved terrible for years pushing a (probably just as clever but way nicer) person to leave. Eventually said “smart” dev struck out and left themselves . Only it should have happened way earlier.
Yeah it can go either way for sure and bad behavior in tech fields is not a new phenomena at all. It could just be we had a few toxic people around here and now we’re on the up and up. I just had the thought after my discussion at work that maybe morons like me are driving off the smart folks off. Edit: again being smart doesn’t give free reign to be a dick either, there’s a middle ground here is what I’m getting at.
@elstoc yeah I know he left voluntary, I was just using it as an example as I’m sure I ruffled his feathers with my dumb questions a time or two.
Unlike the workplace or certain communities, this forum gives people the freedom to explore and learn collaboratively. What is not freedom is condescension, toxicity and the so-called BAHD (Bullying, Abuse, Harassment, Discrimination) behaviours. They do not contribute to anything productive and drive away more people than unintelligent or silly people will ever do.
Threads can certainly be diluted by fluff and off-topic posts and comments, which I have found myself doing—apologies, that make it hard for people to discover useful information or search and find a year later. That is what flagging is for.
It’s always an option to not answer questions or posts, e.g. if people think these are stupid questions, instead of being rude on a personal level. This is true for both “sides”.
Agreed. There is never an issue with people who aren’t knowledgeable and are willing to learn and ask questions (even if those questions seem “dumb”). But it’s really hard to know how to respond when people are very insistent about things that are demonstrably wrong and this is the tension that tends to frustrate the “experts” (the quotes are because I’m aware I’m not informed enough to always identify who the experts actually are). I’m not sure there’s a right answer here but I’m just saying I understand the frustration involved. Civility can be hard work.
