For what it’s worth, having been on forums like Fuck Combustion, Erowid, and GameFAQs for an extremely long time, the proportional amount of snark here seems congruent with the amount of traffic they get. I will say I have noticed that instant message based ones feel a little different - IRC and now discord it’s pretty much depending on what you’re there for. Sometimes everyone is a jerk, sometimes everyone is insanely nice, versus posts like these where there’s time dedicated to each comment.

You’d think that stoners and psychonauts would be a little more chill than gamers or the average comments on an article but… Honestly? Not really. The things I’ve noticed that matter is how the vibe of a community is fostered, as that will be the determining factor in how negative responses are received.

In my experience the best possible communities are those that are focused on gaining and sharing knowledge to make the subject easier to have fun with. But if it’s too academic then it becomes a problem again, it needs to be focused on knowledge for creative fun. Whether it’s video games, recreational drugs, academia, the patterns are the same - there’s a common point where the knowledgeable get bored of repeating their information learned from the community to the new users, which leads to the decline of high quality information, which then creates a feedback loop where knowledgeable users then get annoyed and either stop participating or start becoming snobbish or condescending.

The strongest communities that survive this are the ones that have a high concentration of knowledgeable users who encompass different facets surrounding the same topic. There’s a shared understanding of the basic concepts, functions and mechanics that the subject is composed of, but each user’s preference and interest make up the breadth. It seems to help prevent the feedback loop by replacing it with the understanding that preferences make for a wide variety of reaching the same results.

I may understand that my way is suboptimal, but I want to know how I can most optimize this way of doing it. A good community supports that and shares their knowledge in odd and creative ways. A bad community condemns the user for even considering doing it that way in the first place, why bother when you can do it this way instead, I see where you’re coming from but you’re really better off just doing something else… rtfm you can figure it out. The manual: {This page has been intentionally left blank}

There’s also a certain level of “just do it yourself” mentality that ranges based on different hobbies. It’s far easier to talk “theory” about building Mechas, LEGOs or painting minifigs than it is to talk theory about software. Physical or tactile tasks have a different way of interacting with the needed knowledge and getting a new user up to speed usually is pretty simple. It’s talking about techniques, motions, states of existence. Whereas if a new user doesn’t know the lingo for software, chances are they are missing loads of regular and contextual knowledge. Different things just have different levels of ease of access, all with different skill ceilings.

This is mostly just hobby oriented, but it seems somewhat consistent overall. Hell, I’ve seen it in meme subs here like 196, “what’s the point of this post?” Like… Dude… It’s a meme sub, there is no point lol.