Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> writes: > It's really sad to see folks like DFS hop on the list with apparent > enthusiasm for Python and an excitement to learn, only to resort to > name calling and walk away in a huff when folks ask them not to speak > that way around here. I'm not sure why this is.
TL;DR: because we're all human, and human behaviour needs either immediate face-to-face feedback or social enforcement to correct selfishness and abrasiveness. Where face-to-face feedback is lacking, social enforcement needs to take more of the load. Many people have a false sense of entitlement to be caustic in dealing with others, and have no better response to a request that they tone it down than to escalate their bad behaviour. This behaviour is usually counteracted in face-to-face interaction, by being confronted with the immediate result on the other person: most people don't enjoy *seeing* other people become upset, so most people tend to work harder to be more polite in face-to-face discussion. On an internet forum, especially one with such low bandwidth as text, these feedback mechanisms are not sufficient (not immediate enough, and not informative enough) for the person to experience a link from their bad behaviour to the unpleasant consequences. This isn't a new problem. It's not new to the internet, and it certainly isn't new to humans. What is new, though, is that many online communities – the Python community specifically – have decided we are not going to tolerate anti-social behaviour, and we have also enacted policies to enforce that decision. We'll always have some anti-social actors, and bad actions by otherwise good actors. Many of them when confronted will respond with petulance and name-calling and bullying and other schoolyard reflexes. We have to be consistent in rejecting such behaviour from our community. -- \ “Writing a book is like washing an elephant: there no good | `\ place to begin or end, and it's hard to keep track of what | _o__) you've already covered.” —anonymous | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list