Thread: I’m irritated and annoyed! But also grateful.

Well, Scott,

I'm actually sorry you feel embarrassed by a general remark I made. Write it off as an inter-cultural misunderstanding, would you? My point being that what sets SRP apart is the quality of its contents, but quality suffers if the ratio of inexperienced users failing to ask smart questions outgrows the number of people being able to give quality answers. While this text is about technical 'forums', it is - at its core - also about SRP (or, if you will, about other shaving forums that have failed in this respect): How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. You may ask yourself, 'What do straight shavers have to do with hackers?', and quite rightly so. Hackers do, however, share many characteristics with straight razor shavers. Or how else would one explain people using 30k grit hones to get the most out of a razor, or spending countless hours of research to find a way to make a Coticule work more or less the same as a cheaper, more consistent synthetic hone? Hacking is about mis-using technology to make it work in unexpected, but useful or fun ways. A lot of what is being done in the workshop and honing sections of this site is in fact hacking. And it has led to great advancements that benefit many people (compare honing today to honing 3 years ago, or take a look at Glen's walnut tumbler - a classic hack if I ever saw one).

And coming back to the misunderstanding with 'intelligent conversation', let me quote from ESR's article, keeping in mind that this is my personal opinion only:

The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, “Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment.
Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes looks like we're reflexively rude to newbies and the ignorant. But this isn't really true.
What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

I do not agree with too many things ESR says, but I think the above sums up pretty nicely the core problem of any highly specialised internet community. It is about resources, and about keeping the senior members (the ones with high experience, not necessarily high post count) motivated, because otherwise the community will simply wither away.

My background in running internet communities is a predominantly technical one, ie we were able to actually give answers that were right or wrong, whereas with straight razors, there are huge grey areas. But the underlying problem is the same, ie how to accommodate new joiners while retaining or enhancing the quality of a site - without alienating either the new joiners or the senior members. I cannot find one particular text that describes the typical life cycle of internet communities at the moment, but it describes how almost all communities which grew from small, family like groups of enthusiasts to large ones with zealots, fanboys, and egomaniacs, failed. I have even been part of two such communities, and it was not pretty, not least because of the massive amount of work that went down the drain, the spin-offs that failed to deliver quality while producing even more clueless fanboys, and the emergence of cult followings for egomaniacs who were into a particular field because it was easy to gloss over their lack of experience with fancy pictures and tear jerking tales of success and glory.

Maybe that is the way all internet communities are, but even after 23 years, I refuse to accept this as an inevitable fate, ie I would not want something like that to happen to SRP, ever. But when I take a look at its spin-offs, I can see a lot of that happening already. SRP's moderation team, and the dev team, are doing a lot to keep SRP the place where people can find state-of-the-art information, presented in a gentlemanly fashion and can have a nice discussion about things that are only marginally related to the straight razor shaving culture at the same time. But if you compare it to what it was two or three years ago, it has subtly changed. New joiners often get referred to the Wiki, simply because senior members cannot cope with the workload. As long as they are led to specific articles, or even section of articles, I find that a viable solution, and in true SRP spirit (we used to link to archived posts previously, but with the massive rise in archived post numbers, it has become almost impossible to keep track of the ones worth quoting, so the Wiki is - for this particular purpose - superior to the forum). However, 'go read the Wiki' is, in my opinion, not a valid answer. But it happens, and the reason is typically that the person asking the question did not even read the FAQ. Which, as I said before, should be common courtesy, and will lead to smart questions.

So, sorry for the misunderstanding, and I hope the above will clear things up.

Regards,
Robin