Having worked in the open for over 20 years I've conversed with people from all over the world and all different walks of life.
Recently I've noti...
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In many of these situations, I think a strong factor is that the tone is not well communicated in text. For instance, I could easily imagine someone saying "I'd to hear your thoughts" in a tone that makes it sound like "Oh yeah? Well, do it better yourself or shut up!" In their world, you were the one that started the hostility.
Another factor is the anonymity in these situations. It's much easier to act rude/honest when you don't have other peoples eyes on you, which is natural. Because let's be honest, there are things we don't do because of risk of being viewed as a bad person by others. Sure, I would not murder people if I got away with it, but not being anonymous does put some limits on my behavior. It's a part of human nature.
A third thing is that I believe most people occasionally act how you describe it. That's why it seems to be so many of them. I can definitely recall discussions where I have gotten tunnel vision. I'm not proud of it, but it has happened. But unfortunately, these are the things we remember. It's a sort of confirmation bias.
I imagine that these things are statistically more common among programmers for a simple reason. Autism is over represented among programmers. I'm not personally diagnosed, but I would not be surprised if I have it to a small degree.
I totally understand if you get fed up with it. And I don't have a good solution. I usually try to assume best intentions. Sometimes I end the discussion with something like "With all respect, I can give brief explanations to my choices if you're curious. However, I'm not really interested in a debate. If you prefer git, good for you. I just happen to disagree."
One suggestions. I guess that you have a few friends in these communities where these discussions arise. Ask them to explain why you're getting silent. No idea if it's a good solution or not.
Take care <3
You will not stop people to show the world, how narrowminded they are.
Not related to the post, just to share my surprise that Pidgin still exists - I used this fella in 2004 on my company's intranet 👴🏼
Yep we're still here working towards finally getting Pidgin 3 out the door.
One way you could try to approach it, for instance when it comes to write a post about why you prefer Mercurial, is to remember that for every person who comes with one of those narrow minded comments, there are probably hundred silent readers who finds the post interesting and valuable. Most people are perfectly satisfied with reading without commenting.
Also, by nature, people are more likely to comment when they don't agree. Because if they agree, what's there to say? So for every single person who writes a negative comment there are ten who didn't write simply because they agree with you.
That sounds a lot like hearsay... But like I said in the post, there's nothing for me to gain in writing that post. Helping silent people as I deal with an onslaught of negativity is not something I'm going to be able to justify to myself.
Well, the numbers are completely made up. They were just there to illustrate. But I think the principle still stands. Go to any youtube video and compare the amount of views to the amount of comments. I would be impressed if you could find any video with at least 1000 views that has at least 200 comments. And even if you could, I guess you would agree that it's very rare?
But sure, ultimately you are the one who has to decide what is best for you and your health. If there's nothing to gain for you, it's of course the correct decision. But I have to admit that I am curious about the answer. :)
Sure, but views aren't everything, popularity is finite as it is a time based. This is something many people, especially in tech seem to forget. Always asking what the "best" tool or method is for everything and then they believe it as dogma.
But always, the best tools are the ones that let you accomplish your goals effectively which is why someone else's opinion on tooling isn't always a great idea because their use case isn't yours.
To be honest I find myself doing that a lot, feeling the need to tell someone on the internet how and why they're wrong (here's the relevant xkcd by the way).
More often than not I'll delete my comment before submitting it, but sometimes I think it's still worth posting because it contributes to the conversation. I mean it might not have been the responses you were expecting when you started talking about planting crops, making a build system on a respberry pi, or using mercurial, but they still made for more interesting conversation than if they had simply replied "ok, cool" and moved on.
Even when chatting with friends on topics we mostly agree on I'll usually play devil's advocate and argue that they're still kinda wrong just for the sake of the argument.
I personally dislike "the sake of argument" arguments... Like if you have a point, cool lets talk about that, but if you're just busting my balls, I'm going to be annoyed that you're wasting my time ;)
"here's THE relevant xkcd" - I love the assumption that there always exist a relevant xkcd, which is often true :)