I'm sure no fan of dismissive, know-it-all programmers, but to play devil's advocate, who's injecting their feelings into a site with the explicit purpose of solely answering programming questions?
I think any tool which facilitates communication between 2 or more humans will involve emotions. I'd guess it's certainly likely to be the case on a forum for technical Q&A, for multiple potential reasons:
- the questioner and the answerer might have vastly different levels of experience & therefore struggle to exchange ideas in terms they both understand
- people might already be frustrated when they ask a question, since they may have already invested a lot of time trying (and failing) to solve a problem
- multiple answerers are competing to be the endorsed answer, and there are rewards associated with it
But that doesn't mean they should dominate everything we do.
Feelings shouldn't control us, they can guide us sure enough, but the moment they control us we might just as well climb back up the trees and go back to angrily flinging poo at each other.
Well said. People mostly want to avoid hurting others feelings, but that opens us up to an attack vector where a person or group demands that others change their behaviour so as to respect their feelings, but in bad faith a means of subjugating others. The Crybully exploit if you will.
This has become such a common feature of every debate that the angry mobs on the internet are a greater threat than government to freedom of speech.
