I learned so much over the years abusing Cunningham's.
Could have a presentation for the C-suite for a major company, post some tenuous claim related to what I intended to present on, and have people with PhDs in the subject citing papers correcting me with nuances that would make it into the final presentation.
It's one of the key things I miss about Reddit. The scale of Lemmy just doesn't have the same rate and quality of expertise jumping in to correct random things as a site with 100x the users.
The major problem with reddit is that you could never really trust the credentials of the person you were talking to. They might have been PhDs or they might have been 13 year olds who just learned to Google. It amazes me how many times I saw a highly upvoted comment posted about a subject that I knew a lot about, but was just so blatantly wrong.
To be fair this is not a Reddit thing and it can be found in the fediverse too. I can remember some of such situations where a person just posted wrong stuff but in a very confident way. I was able to prove him wrong later but nobody cared anymore.
Unless the thing falls under non-commercial electronics or computing. The community on here is skewed towards that for obvious reasons.
I always kind of felt like those voices began to be drowned out the more and more popular reddit became. You're correct about Lemmy's scale, but there is certainly a sweet spot. I'm happy knowing Lemmy hasn't yet reached its own, and reddit's is long gone. I'm happier here and it's likely only going to get better.
Errmmmmh achstually.., lol
imo it's not that correcting feels better than helping but rather it's easier to correct someone than draft an answer of your own.
Sometimes that's part of the issue (or the whole deal), but sometimes it's not even that.
Sometimes it's that someone asked something difficult and elaborate to answer, which has been answered a ton of times, and it's tedious to answer again and again. But if someone answers with misinformation or even straight FUD, then one needs to feel the urge to correct that to prevent misinformation.
I suffered that with questions in r/QtFramework. Tons of licensing questions, repeated over and over, from people who have not bothered to read a bit about such a well known and popular license as LGPL. Then someone who cares little for the nuance answers something heavy handed, and paints a wrong picture. Then I can't let the question pass. I need to correct the shitty answer. :-(
I would say that if someone asks a difficult question it's often difficult because it's very general, so you don't have any specific point to answer that you know will satisfy the person asking.
On the other hand, if someone is writing misinformation then they provide specific statements which still may be difficult to correct but you have those anchor points you can refer to.
So I guess the thing here is that if someone, after asking a question, writes a BS answer they actually refine their question and narrow its scope, thus making it easier to answer.
I usually see broad questions about rather simple things unanswered, but very specific yet difficult questions answered
ACTually, they're still helping you, so it would be better to say correcting = helping.
Sincerely,
Definitely not Gollum's alt.
Smeagol is that you?
Don't asks us, precious.
Nicely corrected, thanks.
This is like putting a $10 price tag on a free sidewalk item so someone will steal it.
It's an older meme, sir, but it checks out. I was just about to upvote it.
Who post programming questions on Reddit? Are you looking for answers in meme format?
reddit was/is much more than a meme site
Honestly, meme communities' comments could have some of the best in-depth discussions. Memes tend to provide a great launching point for discussions. A sort of prompt that everyone can coalesce around to talk in a serious manner about the subject.
/r/dndmemes and /r/programmerhumor were two great examples.
There are serious programming subs. However, I find that those tend to debate/discuss solutions/approaches moreso than the actual code itself, although that's not unheard of either. For actual coding questions, I want to say there's a "learn programming" sub that has those, but they're pretty strict about just doing people's homework for them (those posts tend to be pretty obvious).
Niche professional subs under 100k members can be very good quality. That's the only thing that is hard for me to find a replacement for.
Almost like that xkcd joke...
I was trying to remember where I read this originally. Thank you.
