imo it’s not that correcting feels better than helping but rather it’s easier to correct someone than draft an answer of your own.
Sometimes that’s part of the issue (or the whole deal), but sometimes it’s not even that.
Sometimes it’s that someone asked something difficult and elaborate to answer, which has been answered a ton of times, and it’s tedious to answer again and again. But if someone answers with misinformation or even straight FUD, then one needs to feel the urge to correct that to prevent misinformation.
I suffered that with questions in r/QtFramework. Tons of licensing questions, repeated over and over, from people who have not bothered to read a bit about such a well known and popular license as LGPL. Then someone who cares little for the nuance answers something heavy handed, and paints a wrong picture. Then I can’t let the question pass. I need to correct the shitty answer. :-(
i do the same thing. its called Murphy’s law :D
I learned so much over the years abusing Cunningham’s.
Could have a presentation for the C-suite for a major company, post some tenuous claim related to what I intended to present on, and have people with PhDs in the subject citing papers correcting me with nuances that would make it into the final presentation.
It’s one of the key things I miss about Reddit. The scale of Lemmy just doesn’t have the same rate and quality of expertise jumping in to correct random things as a site with 100x the users.
The major problem with reddit is that you could never really trust the credentials of the person you were talking to. They might have been PhDs or they might have been 13 year olds who just learned to Google. It amazes me how many times I saw a highly upvoted comment posted about a subject that I knew a lot about, but was just so blatantly wrong.
To be fair this is not a Reddit thing and it can be found in the fediverse too. I can remember some of such situations where a person just posted wrong stuff but in a very confident way. I was able to prove him wrong later but nobody cared anymore.
Who post programming questions on Reddit? Are you looking for answers in meme format?
reddit was/is much more than a meme site
Honestly, meme communities’ comments could have some of the best in-depth discussions. Memes tend to provide a great launching point for discussions. A sort of prompt that everyone can coalesce around to talk in a serious manner about the subject.
/r/dndmemes and /r/programmerhumor were two great examples.
And they’re still pretty good on Lemmy!
