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Comment by mittensc | Hacker News Reader

Try and follow /new on raspberry_pi or similar...

You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.

And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise)

Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam...

If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)

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If you block beginners questions and posts then the entire community becomes pretty hostile and annoying to be in.

If you don't block beginners then the entire community will leave and you end up with the /r/suggestALaptop type subreddit. A woodworking subreddit will have 3 daily "What's the best table saw for a beginner" and "Dewalt vs Milwakee?" threads and anyone who cares will leave and you're left with all the bots and people trying to sell you stuff.

The funny thing is that didn't use to be a problem in online communities back in the day. Every forum has a "New Users" section, a beginner section, maybe an intermediate section and an advanced section. There were forums I would hang out on in the beginners and common areas and only readonly the advanced area until I felt confident enough to participate in the conversation there intelligently or to even have a smart enough question to ask.

This doesn't work in a place like reddit or stackoverflow. Those places are simply too big to have a cohesive consistent "culture" (for lack of a better word). You can't turn newbies away from /r/3dprinting because no body is on /r/4dprinting_for_beginniers. And people on the former don't care about the latter because it's not part of "the community".

Back in the day it also used to be a problem and answer used to be 'get better' or 'rtfm' and general laughter.

That I used to find mean, now I see it as necessary but nobody does it anymore (lack of anonimity I guess)

If someone fails to do basic research that then it's on them. They lack basic grit or other skills that they should learn.

Also, someone asking the same basic question that, id typed in google would have led them to previous threads is a special type of idiocy or attention seekinf

> You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.

As a beginner at anything it’s hard to search. It’s the “you don’t know what you don’t know problem”. I see this all the time both as the expert and the beginner.

On topics I understand, I can craft a google query that will drop exactly what I’m looking for as the first result. On new topics I have to query and scan over and over until I start to hone in on some key words.

usual answer before was get better.

get better at searching, read documentation, manuals, books, articles, etc.

When you are stuck with something non trivial usually other people will jump to help as they've likely spent time on it as well.

If someone fails to do that then it's on them. They lack basic grit or other skills that they should learn.

>utterly failing to understand that it's a bootstrapping problem

How does one know where to start? Which manual to read first?

search for "<topic x> tutorial"

read the right hand side section on each reddit group dedicated to begginers.

read some manuals/books...

what you said only fails for novel topics like quantum computing.

> search for "<topic x> tutorial"

As if that wouldn't be spammed with SEO slop.

> read some manuals/books

Knowing which ones are credible is part of the bootstrapping.

> right hand side section on each reddit group dedicated to begginers

That's probably a useful advice, as they'd likely list which books are good and which are even better but useless for beginners.

> "not bothering to spend any time searching"

because searching has become MUCH worse, and because even when it used to be good, searching is a SKILL.

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