or "flamewar", which almost sounds a bit anachronistic now. I don't think I've been in one in a long time actually. The early 2000s were a lot rougher and often toxic compared to what you have today.
Internet discourse is still hit and miss but it's more mature.
Strongly agree. It used to be the accepted norm that you’d ban relentlessly evade to get back at the admin who flamed you in their ban message. However, there was the tacit understanding that it was the internet and none of it was real: just log off and go outside once you got sick of it.
Now that i've spent time answering support questions on a forum for an open source project i'm involved with...
I still think rtfm is rude and wouldn't say it, but i 100% understand why people would want to say it.
On one hand, I see so many occasions where someone typically new to something even if they aren’t new to programming asking questions that could be trivial found in a second.
On the other hand I’ve seen enough handwavy RTFM copypastas from people who clearly neglected to read the question being asked as well as enough manuals [documentation, etc.] that wants to make me bash my head in with how usuals, unspecific, difficult to navigate it is.
I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.
As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.
Edit: I feel like I should point out that I agree that RTFM is an incredibly offensive term, but some form of answer like: “it is covered in the documentation” actually conveys one important bit of information: The answer can actually be found in the documentation.
A direct link to the documentation section they should use is the minimal reasonable answer, in my opinion.
Imagine a term like "RTFM" being coined and used in popular tech formus today. Back in the days "RTFM" was a valid one-word response to any number of questions by a n00b; if said question was in an IRC channel you'd often get kicked or even kick-banned for good measure.