PSA: How NOT to treat newbies in tech communities

[EnthalpiousKitten]

So the below linked reddit post has come to my attention today and I can say it brings back flashbacks of a ton of social trauma from toxic elitist infested tech communities, be it bad programming forums or some of my university's own troll-infested tech chat servers. Honestly mistreatment of new people who want to learn technical skills is absolutely insane. Healthy online communities, like this forum or my little circle of programmer/hacker friends on Mastodon (a Twitter alternative), are way better than the Telegram chat that gets roasted by these Redditors. Hell even on Telegram it's fairly rare to find people treating others like this...

This Reddit post should serve as a friendly reminder to be patient and kind to people with less technical knowledge than you. If you're a hacker/modder like me or just a general power user, don't expect newbies to always know what you know. Calmly teach new people whatever they are interested in, and make them feel free/comfortable to ask any question on any topic-related matter no matter how basic or stupid it might seem to you with your experience. We were ALL newbies at one point.

Tech community toxicity actually caused me to downright hate coding and few other things I enjoy now for many years until I finally got over the psychological damage from elitist cyberbullying.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androidroo...ndroidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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[tismydroid]

When I was learning how to root my OG droid there was only two forums I decided to use; DroidForums and Android Central because they were helpful, friendly, informative and you didn't feel like an ***** when asking stupid questions. And I learned how to root my phone without going to the toxic sites.

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[EnthalpiousKitten]

My worst experience with a forum was even worse than forum toxicity. Back when I was 13 years old (9 years ago) I opened up a Galaxy Tab specific forum looking for rooting instructions, and oh hell that turned my mom's laptop into a machine for spitting out non-stop Trojan infection warnings for a few hours.

As for forum toxicity, well I at age 16 joined a coding forum and when one of my proof of concept things was called useless and I was also accused of asking stuff that was "too basic". I in revenge hardcore trolled the forum for MONTHS and social engineered my way into not being immediately banned. The site was never the same afterwards and it's now at a fraction of its past glory in terms of what it puts out and the influence in the particular niche of programming it serves.

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