exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Sometimes you just need to find that first post to get going no? Especially if it is an extremely rare topic.

alexh wrote: 14 Nov 2022 14:59 Sometimes you just need to find that first post to get going no? Especially if it is an extremely rare topic.

I'm not sure I get your drift? Most questions I see that fit this pattern are not on rare topics, but simple stuff that can be found in minutes with Google.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 14 Nov 2022 14:04 If you're busy, what else can you do? And sometimes people expect that you are free to talk for hours and hours, and when you remind them politely you're not, they take offense.

Some others have said the same as well. I think it might have been Jookie.. People would ask help with ultrasatan then start waffling on about their holidays or something..

I used to have the same problem when I used to talk to women online years ago. I would actually talk to them for a few hours until the middle of the night.. Then it would get to like 4am.. And I would have to say I'm going to have to go because it is 4 AM and I need to get up at 7am for work.. The amount of abuse I got after saying that was absolutely unbelievable. They would seriously fly off at the deep end saying how I never had any intention of talking to them or any interest in getting to know them ( even after just spending even several hours talking to them!) . I mean geese, I could write a book on all that as well.

Then there were the ones that would talk to you for weeks or months with no intention of meeting up, but quite happily go and meet up with someone else after they have only talk to them for a couple of days.. So I would then say there is literally no point in continuing talking to them because they have met someone else, it is literally done nothing but waste my time, I would rather spend my time on talking to someone who I do actually have a chance of meeting up with... Of course I likely worded at a bit more diplomatically... But again geese.. The amount of abuse I got from people... Though I do actually remember one person understood and accepted what I said. So there is always that " almost one sane person out there".

In fact that escalated a lot over the years. I probably said before a few times in the past the last time I went on any sort of messenger I literally blocked everyone. Even if I had talked to them for several years. The last straw was when one girl came online moaning about her boyfriend where I spent a few hours trying to calm her down.. Then the next one came online moaning about her boyfriend where I then spent another two hours... The third on came online moaning about her boyfriend... I thought f*ck this. I have been talking to them for months or even years and they would not even meet up. But there would happily go meet up with some other idiot which obviously treated them like total garbage. And somehow this was all my problem ? no thanks. There was probably 20-30 people I had been talking to one and off over the years trying to get a "date". In the end I just gave up and has blocked the whole lot of them and had done with it.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 14 Nov 2022 15:32

alexh wrote: 14 Nov 2022 14:59 Sometimes you just need to find that first post to get going no? Especially if it is an extremely rare topic.

I'm not sure I get your drift? Most questions I see that fit this pattern are not on rare topics, but simple stuff that can be found in minutes with Google.

I think he meant Just pointing people in the right direction (like guides on my website on this forum for example) for general topics ?

exxos wrote: 14 Nov 2022 15:39

rubber_jonnie wrote: 14 Nov 2022 15:32

I'm not sure I get your drift? Most questions I see that fit this pattern are not on rare topics, but simple stuff that can be found in minutes with Google.

I think he meant Just pointing people in the right direction (like guides on my website on this forum for example) for general topics ?

Possibly, yes, which is where I'm going with it from now on.

exxos wrote: 14 Nov 2022 13:15Again as I have said before. There is just a inherent "split" going on with various communities. Do people today even know what a forum is ? is really quite unsettling when you think about it all. We are people here generally wanting to help, generally want to learn, and generally know about stuff and can give proper advice. Then we get communities like on Facebook, where it is the blind leading the blind. Then they will take to youtube doing videos on all things not to do and then that information will become standard.. And around in circles we'll go again.....

There is something in here that is common across fields. My dayjob is network research, operations, and some types of policy; these are fields that historically make heavy use of email discussion lists. In these places, people still bicker about HTML email and apologise top-posting. For a 20 year old entering the field today? That's archaic beyond belief. There's a continual discussion now on how to be more inviting to new people, and there's no good answer.

I think a problem is the discoverability problem when you have so many different ways to find things, not all of them indexable/searchable. I grew up with my STE in the 90s, scrabbling around to collect as much information as I could from the monthly magazines and the cover disks, which was actually quite a good drip-feed for a 10 year old's brain, but also it was my only real option. Much later, things like usenet posts, discussion lists, and forums started to come up. Now? Youtube and discord and twitch streamers and twitter and mastodon and who knows what else and, way down the list, forums. There's a wealth of stuff out there and ... I dunno; separating the wheat from the chaff must be a whole different experience for folks starting out today compared to the past.

stween wrote: 14 Nov 2022 16:45

exxos wrote: 14 Nov 2022 13:15Again as I have said before. There is just a inherent "split" going on with various communities. Do people today even know what a forum is ? is really quite unsettling when you think about it all. We are people here generally wanting to help, generally want to learn, and generally know about stuff and can give proper advice. Then we get communities like on Facebook, where it is the blind leading the blind. Then they will take to youtube doing videos on all things not to do and then that information will become standard.. And around in circles we'll go again.....

There is something in here that is common across fields. My dayjob is network research, operations, and some types of policy; these are fields that historically make heavy use of email discussion lists. In these places, people still bicker about HTML email and apologise top-posting. For a 20 year old entering the field today? That's archaic beyond belief. There's a continual discussion now on how to be more inviting to new people, and there's no good answer.

I think a problem is the discoverability problem when you have so many different ways to find things, not all of them indexable/searchable. I grew up with my STE in the 90s, scrabbling around to collect as much information as I could from the monthly magazines and the cover disks, which was actually quite a good drip-feed for a 10 year old's brain, but also it was my only real option. Much later, things like usenet posts, discussion lists, and forums started to come up. Now? Youtube and discord and twitch streamers and twitter and mastodon and who knows what else and, way down the list, forums. There's a wealth of stuff out there and ... I dunno; separating the wheat from the chaff must be a whole different experience for folks starting out today compared to the past.

Honestly, I think half of it is not knowing how to search properly, the other half is an unwillingness to search at all. I hear what you're saying about a surfeit of information, and I understand that sometimes people do struggle. It's not those people that annoy me, at least they tried, but there are so many people who expect a one stop silver bullet answer and who aren't even willing to have a look for themselves. I see it all over FB primarily, and not just ST stuff either, many subjects, people just want to be spoonfed and are not interested in understanding. The number of 'What chip do I replace to fix problem A' questions I see, and when you ask what they've looked at, it's nothing, they just expect a magic answer and cannot, or will not understand that it's not so simple.

I will admit that at the moment, I am more sensitive than usual, but if people are unwilling to help themselves I'm going to stop offering my help anywhere else but here.

You also have to remember that a lot of classic computer owners are no longer enthusiasts like us. They are common users who had these computers when they were kids / young adults and they are just trying to maintain / improve what they have.

You think that the every day Atari ST owner knew anything about electronics, or even how to unscrew the case? They were just users. Knowing what to search for in the first place I imagine can be overwhelming. "Atari ST doesn't work. How to fix?" gets you hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant hits.

We have 30 years of google fu, English is our first language, we are technically proficient.

Imagine your Dad trying to fix an ST to try to put yourself in the position of a lot of users.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 14 Nov 2022 18:30Honestly, I think half of it is not knowing how to search properly, the other half is an unwillingness to search at all. I hear what you're saying about a surfeit of information, and I understand that sometimes people do struggle. It's not those people that annoy me, at least they tried, but there are so many people who expect a one stop silver bullet answer and who aren't even willing to have a look for themselves. I see it all over FB primarily

Clipping here because I agree with what you're saying in general, and also: things like facebook are inherently not indexable by google/bing/duckduckgo/etc, and facebook's own search is pretty garbage. Facebook is not primed to encourage great discussion or even good behaviour, and groups are often maintained with the absolute minimum amount of moderator effort.

On @alexh's point that some people have just inherited a thing or are rediscovering a thing: I see posts like this on Atari ST groups on facebook and the results are ... kind of what you'd expect. Too often I see an excited post about a childhood ST which still boots, and the comments are some terrible mix of one-liner responses with no context like "oh boy recap the psu IMMEDIATELY!", "I never recapped my PSU and it still works great no problems", "buy a gotek no more floppies", "buy a kryoflux", "here's a link to some garbage ad-filled repo with disk images!", etc, and ... I kind of feel bad in the opposite direction, too! I wonder how much pollution comes from this kind of interaction. It turns into "I want to recap because a stranger said I had to, but I have zero experience".

Interesting discussion, from my own perspective there is a required skill base in performing any type of information gathering from the internet or you end up sifting through a lot of useless information.

TBH modern problem solvers have so many sources of information it has become difficult to actually get creditable outcomes in processing a problem. For example:
YouTube has created over-night experts, with very few credentials other than watching other YouTube videos :lol:,
Google is probably more about trying to sell you something rather than give you viable results in your search :roll:, and
Facebook well it is just .... turned it off ages ago, I have better things to occupy my time ;).

I find that the Millennials, Gen Z and Gen A have become time poor and overloaded with information from the multitude of communication platforms they use. In such a way that they have difficulty in making a clear decision, so their knee-jerk is to get others to solve the problem for them. My own adult children demonstrate this fairly regularly, some of the phone calls / texts I receive. Well I just shake my head and say "do you really need me to answer that question" :lol: