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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Public forums serve a different purpose to a live chat. Actually what I’m seeing a lot in the comments is people making assumptions about what the purpose of the discord server is, and from those assumptions then conclude that it would be easy to use something else. Some assume that they use it for documentation (???), some assume it’s for technical support. But usually what I see, is that these kinds of servers are just an attempt to build a community. And for building a community in the tech space, discord has by far the biggest user base for a chat solution (unless you really think there are more target audience using Facebook messenger, than discord?)


  • I’m sorry but where is this random assumption that the documentation is on discord coming from?? It is extremely common for projects/organisations to have some kind of community discord, but I have never seen one that used it as their main documentation host. The discord are almost always just community hubs to chat with other community members.




  • I’m not sure how helpful this will be, but I think it is misleading for you to think of these things as “rules”. Calling them rules implies that people know what they are, and try to abide by them. But I don’t think thats whats happening.

    Since written communication conveys so much less emotion than verbal communication, people tend to read more into the textual form to infer things like emotion or intent. There aren’t specific rules for this, people just pick up on patterns. For example angry or excited people tend to use capitals to “sound louder”. People talking casually tend to leave out some grammar. Friendly conversations tend to have more long rambling sentences, as opposed to someone trying to prove a point with concise, well punctuated sentences.

    So I think what NTs are doing is just subconsciously figuring out these patterns to determine a likely emotion/intent behind messages.

    To me, “K” isn’t rude for the reasons your friend tried to list, but it does sound “colder” to me, probably because my brain sees a pattern where the people who are not interested in talking to me will tend to use short succinct responses, while people happy to talk will use longer form.

    But a huge part of communication, especially online, is just getting used to the people you talk to. It’s happened many times that someone who seemed grumpy to me at first turned out to be very friendly, etc.


  • Sometimes people want to be generally helped, and sometimes people just want an answer to their question. If the answer is “it’s impossible” then that’s a valid answer, but if the answer is “I’m not going to tell you, instead I’m going to assume that what you actually want is me to teach you why you were wrong to ask the question in the first place” then theres a good chance that actually they just wanted an answer, and you deciding for them what they need comes across as patronising.


  • I think the talking down aspect comes from phrases like “you shouldn’t be doing X”, especially when these statements are made as absolutes, rather than contextualised with actual reasons.

    Running GUI programs as root might cause security problems, or it might cause software problems. And while you might find these issues important, others might not.

    In my opinion, saying something like “it’s not a good idea if you care about security” or “doing so might make your PC burst into flames” gives helpful warnings for OP and future readers without talking down to them by making decisions for them what they should and should not do.