Why online forums have bad behaviour (was: Steve D'Aprano, you're the "master". What's wrong with this concatenation statement?)

[Ben Finney]

Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> writes:

> It's really sad to see folks like DFS hop on the list with apparent
> enthusiasm for Python and an excitement to learn, only to resort to
> name calling and walk away in a huff when folks ask them not to speak
> that way around here. I'm not sure why this is.

TL;DR: because we're all human, and human behaviour needs either
immediate face-to-face feedback or social enforcement to correct
selfishness and abrasiveness. Where face-to-face feedback is lacking,
social enforcement needs to take more of the load.


Many people have a false sense of entitlement to be caustic in dealing
with others, and have no better response to a request that they tone it
down than to escalate their bad behaviour.

This behaviour is usually counteracted in face-to-face interaction, by
being confronted with the immediate result on the other person: most
people don't enjoy *seeing* other people become upset, so most people
tend to work harder to be more polite in face-to-face discussion.

On an internet forum, especially one with such low bandwidth as text,
these feedback mechanisms are not sufficient (not immediate enough, and
not informative enough) for the person to experience a link from their
bad behaviour to the unpleasant consequences.


This isn't a new problem. It's not new to the internet, and it certainly
isn't new to humans.

What is new, though, is that many online communities – the Python
community specifically – have decided we are not going to tolerate
anti-social behaviour, and we have also enacted policies to enforce that
decision.

We'll always have some anti-social actors, and bad actions by otherwise
good actors. Many of them when confronted will respond with petulance
and name-calling and bullying and other schoolyard reflexes. We have to
be consistent in rejecting such behaviour from our community.

-- 
 \          “Writing a book is like washing an elephant: there no good |
  `\        place to begin or end, and it's hard to keep track of what |
_o__)                              you've already covered.” —anonymous |
Ben Finney