

Building Social Software for the Anti-Social - mootothemax
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/12/building-social-software-for-the-anti-social.html

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markokocic
Why, oh why, this stupid meme that programmers are asocial or antisocial still
exists in this day and age? Is it because of some antisocial programmer
individual that wants to be like everyone else, and label everyone else as
antisocial? Or is it because they have less "friends" than merketing guys
whose job is to call acquaintances friend? I agree that there are asocial
people in this profession, but no more than in any other profession, and this
generalization is only making harm to other programmers.

As a punishment to this name calling, I will remove his site from my "Ad
block" exceptions list and will call all my "friends" to do that too ;)

~~~
naner
_I agree that there are asocial people in this profession, but no more than in
any other profession_

I think this is clearly false. The sciences attract the type of personality
that is capable of intense focus which seems to be paired with some
difficulties in social interaction (Asperger's lite?).

While I'm well socially adjusted now, I am introverted by nature and had to
work at fixing social deficiencies my friends never exhibited. When I look at
peers in my field I see either people like me who had to work at being
socially well-adjusted or people who are still socially stunted because they
never took the time to work on it. I have met very very few programmer-social-
butterflies.

I believe this also explains why there are relatively few women in our field:
this type of personality is not as common in women.

[That being said, I think 'Anti-Social' is more of an insult than a
description of a personality trait. And his presentation looks condescending.]

~~~
markokocic
Ok, this might be true, and logical. But then, it still applies in the same
sense to civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and all engineers in general,
not only programmers. But still, only programmers are flagged with "asocial"
flags.

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spiffistan
I do believe asocial would be a more accurate term. Anti-social is more or
less synonymous with psychopath.

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llambda
I'm not sure I would term these ten ideas "counterintuitive"; in fact they
come off as rather obvious, apropos the modern web. Maybe I'm in the minority
on this but it seems like even just visiting SO a couple of times you get an
impression for how and why it works and that seems to have been applied more
broadly, e.g. Quora, to carry on with the Q&A model. Clearly treating this
kind of thing as a social game is the root of the success of social news, for
instance. Possibly this is just the benefit of the hindsight, nonetheless,
certainly today they aren't counterintuitive?

