There are plenty of people involved in online discussion groups who are more than willing to give you advice, often whether you request it or not. That advice will sometimes be presented as a Law of the Universe, and then defended vigorously when exceptions to their rule start to add up. The posting of such opinions as immutable facts, and the keyboard courage saturated flame wars that erupt in defense of these opinions, may be about the closest thing to a tradition that exists on the internet these days.
The majority of these opinions are honestly based on a person’s actual experience. Yes, there are trolls out there, people who make things up just to get a rise out of everyone else – more keyboard courage. (Don’t even get me started about the “comments” that follow news articles on the internet.) A properly managed (meaning moderated) discussion board can keep such nonsense to a minimum. And yet, vigorous debates often erupt without the presence of a troll, and seriously degrade the signal-to-noise ratio of a discussion. All it takes is for one or more of the participants to forget the truth contained within a simple phrase, one that really needs to see wider use on the internet.
Your mileage may vary.
Whether you are climbing the learning curve of amateur astronomy or working to make your self-published books more visible to the public, you’re going to find more than one way to approach any given problem. Ask a question online and you will likely receive more than one answer, and all of them may be quite correct – for the person providing the advice. The fun begins when someone mistakes his or her experience and the resulting workaround, for a rule that cannot – or must not – be violated. It worked as XYZ for this person, and so the equally useful results of another correspondent using an ABC approach must be bogus, and evidence is provided (often with a dose of sarcasm or open scorn) to prove the point. Never minding for a moment that ABC accomplished the same goal as XYZ. Is someone faking it? Is someone just trying to be a phony internet expert? It happens, but not as often as you might think. What usually happens is that an honest desire to help someone gets crossed up with an ego trip, and the possibility that another person’s experiences may solve the same problem is lost in the shuffle.
There’s a related phenomenon, in which someone tries XYZ and reports back that results weren’t as advertised. Now the provider of the advice is on the spot, and being accused (however mildly) of being wrong brings out an understandable defensiveness. Again, rudeness often ensues, and some poor moderator needs to wade in with a chair and whip to back the combatants into their respective corners. In the end, I suppose, all the necessary information ends up out there to be used, but who wants to slog through hip-deep bullshit to work with it?
It’s too easy, sitting behind a keyboard, to feel empowered and stand your ground, and forget that the other guy may be standing in more or less the same place as you. If both of you solved the same problem, both of you found the right answer, even if your answers are not the same. Sharing those answers in a public venue is a good thing, since it allows people dealing the same (or a similar) situation to consider options that may not otherwise occur to them. But to make a forum as informative as possible, for as many people as possible, we all need to remember that there are often many paths to the same goal. The fact that someone is on a path unlike your own doesn’t mean they can’t read a map. Your mileage may vary, as theirs surely did, and that will quite likely be true also of anyone you try to help.
Under Desert Stars 