Dealing with rudeness
Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offen
ce. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communicati
ons style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problem
s than making others feel warm and fuzzy.
When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone is really acting out
, it is very likely that a senior person on the list or newsgroup or forum will
call him or her on it. If that doesn't happen and you lose your temper, it is l
ikely that the person you lose it at was behaving within the hacker community's
norms and you will be considered at fault. This will hurt your chances of getti
ng the information or help you want.
On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness and posturing that
is quite gratuitous. The flip-side of the above is that it is acceptable form
to slam real offenders quite hard, dissecting their misbehavior with a sharp ver
bal scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground before you try this, however. The
line between correcting an incivility and starting a pointless flamewar is thin
enough that hackers themselves not infrequently blunder across it; if you are
a newbie or an outsider, your chances of avoiding such a blunder are low. If you'
re after information rather than entertainment, it's better to keep your fingers
off the keyboard than to risk this.
(Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of autism or Asperger's
Syndrome, and are actually missing some of the brain circuitry that lubricates
`normal' human social interaction. This may or may not be true. If you are not
a hacker yourself, it may help you cope with our eccentricities if you think of
us as being brain-damaged. Go right ahead. We won't care; we like being whateve
r it is we are, and generally have a healthy skepticism about clinical labels.)
In the next section, we'll talk about a different issue; the kind of `rudeness'
you'll see when you misbehave.
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community forums — in ways detai
led in this article, or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you screwed up,
possibly with colourful asides. In public.
When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, cla
im to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath,
threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet seat up, et
c. Instead, here's what you do:
Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people act
ively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that all criticism should
have been conveyed via private mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it useful
to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your
claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of hyper-courte
sy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding with another's posts,
and told "Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help the user." The resulti
ng departure of clueful participants to elsewhere causes them to descend into me
aningless babble and become useless as technical forums.
Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed up, and (no matter how
gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he's acting out of concern for (1) you
and (2) his community. It would be much easier for him to ignore you and filter
you out of his life. If you can't manage to be grateful, at least have a little
dignity, don't whine, and don't expect to be treated like a fragile doll just
because you're a newcomer with a theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions
of entitlement.
