I think it's a pretty complex problem to solve. Although one could re- word a statement to be polite, it's still just window dressing what are still potentially just thoughtless arrogant statements that still insult people within the community. In other words, I'd rather someone say "Why would you do that? From what I can see it's a sucky idea for reason 1. detailed, 2. detailed and 3 detailed" as opposed to someone say "I prefer my solution - Thank you and have a nice day". I think you're expecting too much thinking that *everyone* is going to do: "I prefer my solution for reason 1. detailed, 2. detailed". It's just not how everyone thinks.
In my humble opinion, I don't think what you're experiencing will get any better, but here are a few thoughts: 1. You can still enjoy the community by changing your expectations and adopting 1 single rule (which I constantly try to remind myself with all the time): See people in a positive light, abrasive comment or otherwise. You're more likely to treat people with respect when you see them as genuinely good people than if you let adhoc comments dictate your feelings for that person. 2. With intentional over the top flare, adding to a fire..... Why on Gods earth are we using Google groups as a community forum? It's kinda, really, truly, sucky. Lol :) I mean really - voting based forums like hackernews/reddit have been around for years. The single most useful tool that moderators/community leaders have at their disposal is to place value based incentives which will get large masses following a set of expectations. Note: I know Google groups has voting, but frankly the implementation bites (Lol).... it does not elevate the good and drown the bad which would allow us to read the valuable and ignore the crap. I don't even register votes happen in google groups. Cheers. On Dec 21, 6:36 am, Jay Fields <j...@jayfields.com> wrote: > I was involved with Ruby and Rails in the early days. The Ruby mailing lists > / conferences were always kind / helpful and the Rails lists / confs were > always hit and miss. There were plenty of great Rails people, and enough > jerks to upset anyone. > > I read this (Clojure) google group pretty frequently awhile ago, but took > several months off. I returned a week ago and after the first day I emailed > Stu H. And said: Is <name withheld> one of the leaders of the community now? > He seems really abrasive. > > Having been through this before I'd recommend a few things. > > - individually, > -- reword responses from: "why would you do that" to "I prefer my solution > because...". "that's not functional and it's ugly!" to "I believe my solution > is more in-line with FP style" etc. The trick is to focus on what you are > looking for (and the positives of the idea) instead of attacking someone > else's solution. > -- in niche communities, once you're labeled as a jerk, you're in trouble. > People won't work with you. People won't answer your questions. And, people > (often unfairly) assume you are wrong, simply because they don't like you. > You can deal with this in a large (mostly anonymous) community. In a small > community it's career limiting. > > - community > -- it might be worth coming up with a few basic rules and removing people who > can't follow them. Obviously, this isn't an easy task, but it might be worth > the effort. > > Also, what happened to Rich? It seems like many wasteful discussions could be > more easily put to bed by his response instead of the current "here's a video > of Rich from a year ago" or "here's a link to something Rich wrote in the > past" > > Or, maybe I'm oversensitive and things are fine. > > Sent from my iPhone -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
