Then the next guy posts a video of his cat yawning - netting 20.000 likes in 5 minutes. Meaning - as a measure of "gratitude" (what does that even mean?
) likes are worthless.
But I now imagine a much bigger imaginary bucket of gratitude from other folks in my hand. Wonderful.
Thats my entire spiel, btw - in case someone hasnt caught on to it by now. Telling everyone I can, that this whole "quick question - quick answer" thing actually doesnt work in information economies.
For corporations to be able to do it, they had to write decision tree based manuals (decision trees, are what an entire generation of app users grew up on, because everyone designing for them thought that they couldnt handle more complexity), and then find footballfields of callcenters full of people just intelligent enough that they arent going crazy, asking people the "very personal" same yes/no questions all the way down to their goal. Then consumer can be king, but they also pay for that.
Support forums dont self correct either. Thats usually the "job" of the same few cynical voices pointing out when people actually posted wrong, or imagined stuff and didnt care. It happens to me as well - but I make an effort not to do it.
That means they work pretty well - when people are actually close to the same informed state, profiting from each others knowledge in fields they dont know some specific stuff about.
And they are horrible and dont work at all, in states - where the manufacturer of something tells all his customers - we dont know, why dont you ask in support forum? This works for a time, then all the somewhat educated folks flee in horror, then it takes about two years for the rest of the people to notice, then they ask each other "which product to buy next?"
tldr; There is a reason, why schools all over the world havent adopted the "support forum" structure yet. But of course its very popular with customers, because it promises free, presonalized, in depth, ... Then doesnt hire anyone - and promote you figure it out..
Here have a medal, once you reach 10.000 likes.
gbatemp is hard to flee from though, because here the actual release information for all that homebrew stuff is posted. Which prompt the question - why is mixing release information/talk about actual bugs and issues and "service requests" still a thing? Answer: Because its hard to differenciate, and if moderators only censor unfriendly behavior - guess what happens. Also the "everyone welcome" thing makes more people happy.
Hacker cultures in general have been very welcoming of every possible kind of person, but they also were "excellence driven". If you mix that with "participation trophy" and "pc language training" culture, it just breaks. The most important thing every millennial (sorry) learned in school at some point was, that you could copy paste a Wikipedia entry, or outsource your homework to some online forum - if you phrased it right. Then they go on to be adults that complain on twitter, to have corporate customer support pick that up in fear of slander.
If the interaction works or not, is not measured by outcome - but if that person feels attended to. Which is also a large part of why support forums can exist for long periods of time, not giving any valid support whatsoever. People have started to notice this, and are now hedging their bets by crossposting - which messes with the structure of information dissamination even more.
To be frank, about a fourth of the people posting in here dont even know - that "homebrew software project" doesnt mean help me get my CFW to work in here.
Because usually they already buy that as a package with any product they want to own. And they start that process by - correct - asking in a support forum (radio shack has closed, because people got "better" information online - by asking for amazon links). So in case of homebrew product (the product is selfcreated and community maintained), they now ask for people to "make it for them" - personally.
Then people try to "package" stuff for them - so they dont have to learn, and can say - here just copy paste - which makes them very happy - until they cant figure out how it works, or until it breaks - then they have still no idea about anything in particular - and the support forum has to get to get them on track again.
Thats my argument for why "asking for information" and "support" (rtfm) are very different things.
But then the "open and inclusive" front comes back in and argues, that everyone should have an opportunity to participate - because thats how our culture "grows" and goes from generation to generation. Issue: We are touching on different paradigms here. People that grew up in decision trees, and swiped their way to a friday date - get more and more removed from what it actually takes to know and fix their stuff.
The industry acknowledges this as well btw, and thinks about new tools to compensate ("visual programming language"
) - but homebrew, for significant parts still follows the "what works" mantra.
And to be honest, thats different for an iPad user, and someone that only ever runs Windows in a VM, because he or she must. And as a result, you have most people stuck at the "copy paste package" stage, ("whats best", "whats easiest way", ...) and can start to wonder what our culture - propagated to the next generations, actually has become..
As a parting joke - Cory Doctorow a few years back wrote about a potential scifi future, where young rebels, would hack xboxes to communicate with each other "unfiltered". Today you use discords (commercial product) to talk about best ways to use Nintendos online service without being banned. Making a youtube video about it, to gain followers to become rich.
I mean - it is a culture clash..
(And I'm not even a programmer, I just entered the scene with the OG xbox - (one of the best scenes to enter to date), and not on reddit (commercial plattform), on the SNESmini...
)
I know - you had to scroll five times, to get to the next posting. I'm sorry.