Answers from postions of typical uber-geek

Answers from postions of typical uber-geek

Note: I'm not uber-geek, I just play devil's advocate. Just 1-2% of ubergeeks in community are enough to drive all women away, so we can not just ignore them.

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1. I never understood why people so often want to punch me - so I've stopped talking serious on public. The people from this mailing list will never punch me if I'll say what I write in my e-mails so I think I'm safe here.

2. See above: I know my conversations are not private, but the important people are seeing them anyway and the rest of the world are not important, so I just don't know what are you trying to say here.

3. Why not ? This my place and we play by my rules, on public I'm mostly silent so "general public" can do anything they want.

4. Other end is other end - I can not predict their reaction. If I said truth as I see it - what more can they want ?

5. I do not want to fight - other people have strange urge to fight me, but that's their problem, not mine. If they can accept the truth and can not prove that what I'm saying is false - what they are are trying to achieve anyway ?

6. It's not my job to correct all things on the internet, but if someone says some incorrect things on my turf - it's my responsibility. Stupid people must be corrected (and weed out if the need arises) or else pointless noise will drown all things here.

7. How will I know ? I see falsehood - I respond. Sometimes I don't have time and hope someone else will respond, but it rarely happens. I wonder why.

8. This is repeat of 2. above or does it have some new points ?

9. Good flamefest can be interesting mental challenge sometimes. It's not important but can be fun - I forget about it once the flames stops, but other people sometimes remember it for year... wonder why...

10. Huh ? There are a difference between written and spoken communication ? What are you talking about ? Do you talk about how some people's face becomes red before they start trying to punch me ?

11. If they are as capable - they can send patch, I'll happily accept it. Instead they are starting to talk about silly things like tact or manners. I just don't know how to shut them up. Why can not they say something useful for once ?

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It's very true that it's all the question of *manners*, but sizable percentage of geeks feel that manners are useless waste of time or even worse: burden that hurts discussion by clouding issues. Before you'll try to explain to geeks how can they use tact you should explain to them why they should bother

I actually thought the points were well demonstrated.  Not strictly devils advocate, more
along the lines of what one might expect from, say, Jonathan Swift.

I think the main issue however, is that it really does come down to community management.
Some  people "get it" and some don't.