I’ve mostly left reddit and switched to beehaw, but I posted on somewhat of a niche tech-related subreddit today since there really isn’t a community for that here yet. And wow, I got instantly downvoted twice and the first comment response was rude and hostile. All I posted was a feature suggestion for software that I thought would be useful and that a good amount of people would like based on other feedback I’ve heard. This is not the sort of topic that should be controversial or aggravating, and it wasn’t like I made an ignorant post suggesting a feature that already existed or otherwise wasn’t well researched.
This type of instantly hostile response has happened numerous times on reddit for various different topics, but I just haven’t posted for a while, so I forgot just how shitty it can feel. It makes me really appreciate how friendly and respectful the community is here on Beehaw and on Mastodon. People seem to have good faith in one another similar to how the internet used to be in the old days.
Have you had similar experiences with Reddit and similarly opposite experiences here on Beehaw/Lemmy?
You’re absolutely correct. I remember years ago I was stuck on a bit of VB script that was vital for my work and a guy basically rewrote my code and put passive aggressive comments like
//another person who thinks he’ll learn programming by getting somebody else to do all the work for him//
And this was all over my code, that i had struggled over for days. What annoyed me the most was my question was about a specific point in the code that was broken. I think of how much effort went into that answer.
Did the person even respond specifically what the question was about? I assume they re-wrote the program because they couldn’t be bothered to explain a complicated exception.
I don’t envy you from the past - VBA is difficult to write in a way that is both clean, easy to debug, and easy to maintain. We have some legacy VBA apps deployed at customers that just won’t die.
He did answer the question - I can’t recall what the actual problem was. I’d taken some VB script written by an old colleague, that parsed a few thousand rows of data and had to do a number of things to it. There were a number of conditions that had to be met and then certain records were modified and sent to another spreadsheet where a mail merge was then set up to send out reports individually. I had no experience of VB, but worked my way through it and was stumped by an error that was being thrown half way through.
The most annoying thing about responses like this dude is that I had kind of liked solving this VB problem and I may well have stuck with it further. But being a little younger and less mellow I kind of solved the problem with his help and never looked at VB again. And to be clear, they didn’t rewrite the script, they just took the time to put comments up and down where things were done that were not going up to his standard. Imagine being a beginner coder having your code taken apart by an obviously experienced programmer sarcastically. Let’s just say I’m glad there’s a place here where I might be able to ask for help