alt Hacker NewsThe new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
Replies
Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding.
The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
They also started top posting!