As someone with ADHD, I hate the "RTFM" motto
I'm a student of software engineering. I'm not a programmer yet, but I use software that is common among this crowd, like i3wm, Neovim and Emacs. I know how to find and read documentation. I've read the obnoxious How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Every time I encounter an issue, I do my diligence. I go through the manuals, I google, I read the docs. My main editor, Emacs, has an extensive manual, with plenty of accurate details. I get that's a huge program (more like a platform, really), but let's just say that a black-and-white 650 pages PDF is not the most ADHD friendly thing in the world.
I'm aware that I chose a career that requires plenty of reading, but I happen to like it a lot and it seems like I have some aptitude for it. I had similar issues in my previous activities anyway. But it's discouraging trying to understand programming and complex software, only to be repelled by people who think everyone has their ability for concentration. Sometimes I completely lose track of time. I can sit on my computer and hyperfocus for up to 48 hours with 20 Chrome tabs open non-stop and Netflix on the background. I may seem productive, but I'm not reading anything. Maybe I read one paragraph or two, and 30 seconds later I can't remember what I was doing. But I still have tasks to accomplish, and sometimes I need help to find useful information on a 700 pages manual.
Luckily I have a great support and determination and have accomplished a lot, but my peers have no idea what I went through to get to where I am. What I don't have in natural born skills I compensate with a lot of raw effort. Everyone has their difficulties and I'm not seeking compassion, but I'd like to suggest people think twice before dismissing as "lazy" someone you know nothing about. That person might have a mental disorder, a reading disorder or even an intellectual disability. Do you wanna be the guy who told a dyslexic to just read the fucking manual?
EDIT: of course I get that time and energy are limited commodities... my point is: don't be an asshole about it. Do what you can and you wanna do, but there's no need to use hostile buzzwords when you communicate with less knowledgeable people. You're not even forced to answer... I much prefer not getting an answer than getting a hostile one.
It's not about dismissing people as lazy. It's a simple question of efficiency. I am going to assume your upset with the "RTFM crowd" essentially encompasses a group of people that collectively work on and provide you with software for free that have zero connection to you, that you have done nothing for. Is it not unreasonable that if said people have spent time and effort documenting their collective wisdom that they should not also feel a little bit free to not be bound to an endless cycle of answering questions already answered elsewhere?
I am not indifferent to your plight. I know people afflicted with adhd. I don't think that the struggle isn't real. But I also don't really understand what it is that you want from them? Unlimited access to their time for nothing but your gratitude in return? OSS is built on the backs of contribution. Contribution is the currency that gets you more than RTFM.
Just don't be an asshole about it.
I see you've made a couple of edits since I responded. Preliminary: I agree on the basic premise of being excellent to one another in the first instance. Everyone gets a free pass. That said
Is naive. Cool interesting places to hang out and do software are constantly overrun by help vampirism. For every person that is interested in a two-way conversation or who has at least done a bit of due diligence and is approaching asking the question with an understanding of the dynamic at play (which is that you are asking for help from strangers with zero offer of reward) there a dozen people that don't respect the dynamic are entitled af and generally deserve the slap-downs they get. Not slapping these requests down turns a trickle to a flood.
This a quote from the archlinux sub. This is how a lot of people feel. It winds me up.
I mean, the entire tildes project is kind of a response to the race to the bottom that happens in most forums.
They're also overrun by overly strict gatekeepers who think they're defending they're community but who are in fact nothing better than tin pot dictators who are power tripping on being able to close questions, sometimes in a really obnoxious manner.
Some programmers don't care if no-one but them uses their software. But many programmers want their software to be widely used. OP is saying one way to achieve that is to have better documentation and better support communities.
So far these are not solved problems. Most software doesn't have OpenBSD levels of good documentation, and that documentation isn't accessible to everyone. (It doesn't need to be). And support communities universally suck.
That can happen sure. I tend to avoid places like that as well. I'm just trying to offer some perspective on why devs may choose to fall back on "it's in the docs". That's what the OP is about. I am not trying to say that all devs are holy paragons of virtue or that all documentation is perfect. Just an opinion from someone who is mostly being asked questions rather than asking them.
I don't understand, there are people thinking the wiki is daunting? That bar is low even for me... and my ADHD is STRONG! lol
Yes. And unfortunately this group of people poison the well for everyone else :(
If a bunch of people struggle with the Arch wiki maybe part of the problem is that wikis fucking suck for documentation. A few of the people who struggle with the wiki have been kind enough to tell you that it doesn't work for them. All of the rest have gone somewhere else.
You may see this as victory. It isn't. It's a failure to see things from the user's point of view.
I don't think the arch linux wiki is the be all and end all of documentation. I shouldn't have attributed that quote. People seem to have super strong feelings about arch and I think it was a misstep to invoke the project in this thread. The point I was trying to show is that there are plenty of people who would rather trade other people's time for their own.
It's weird that you are couching this in terms of victory or defeat. I don't feel victorious over anyone when they fail to achieve their goals. I am indifferent to whether someone who hasn't done and will likely never do fuck all for me succeeds or fails. I spend a fair amount of my time mentoring. I have at least four close friends whose career success has been entirely predicated on the time I have spent building them up. I spend plenty of my free time to answering community questions on various web properties. What I don't and will never do is spend time regurgitating existing and easily locatable documentation. No more no less.
Peace.
EDIT: aside, the amount of projection here is silly. Try not to put words in other people's mouths. You can talk about how you feel, but please don't try to tell me how I feel, aside from positions stated in this thread.
I think someone who doesn’t want to read a wiki would be much happier with another distro! And there are so many options! The Arch fetish has gone too far
Agree 100%
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I think you misunderstand me. I don't think people should be
AFAIK, OSS developers work out of free will, motivated by the community, an interest in the software, the technology, opportunities etc. I'm certainly grateful for their work, and I make no demands... after all, it's free! But I don't think such debt is justification for any kind of hostility. I'm happy to read the manual, but I'm not happy being categorized as "lazy" by people that know nothing about me. You can tell me to read the manual, just take the "fuck" out of the equation an I'll be fine!
Fair enough. I guess RTFM for me isn't a strong thing. It doesn't have the connotations for me that it seems to have for you. If I RTFM someone I'm not suggesting they're lazy. I am suggesting that the answer they seek is in the manual, and that I am not going to regurgitate it. The reason why they didn't read it isn't actually that interesting to me. Hell, if it's a big a manual my RTFM will probably also contain a reference to the relevant section.
RTFM indeed means "read the fucking manual", but that's an idiomatic phrase, not a curse word aimed at someone with the purpose of offending. I'd say possibly many don't even know the acronym's actual component words.
I maintain a couple small open source projects, and albeit seldom, I receive a couple patches. It's really exciting and overwhelming for me even so, and I can only imagine how much labour maintainers of bigger projects put into what they do. I think I can let them be assholes at seldom times (except evil people like Poettering, or assholes like Linus).
Edit: what I actually meant but lost while trying to get my fingers to type it was that they are overworked, and can't know who we're and whether or not we've done our due diligence. Most of them earn nothing out of huge amounts of labour. They get a pass for harsh dismissals, to a certain limit (edit: IMO, of course).
There may be a cultural component here. I'm getting into IT pretty old, I'm not from an English speaking country and did look up the acronym (ironically, I did read the manual on this). Maybe I'm just not part of this culture. But maybe this ought to be taken into account too: people from different places will have different reactions to it. And maybe the community in general might benefit for a better idiom. But I don’t think the problem lies solely on the word itself: there's a troublesome culture of hostile demonstrations of hierarchy. Maybe this seems natural in America, but not for me. In some situations, denying someone with a lazy call to "RTFM" or a link to the "Smart Questions" serves to reinforce the fact that you're the one in the position of power, like Oedipus and the Sphinx.
While I agree that everyone can make mistakes and should be indulged up to a point, I don't think anyone, in any position, gets to have a free pass. Open source developers work out of their own volition. I'm extremely grateful for their work, but I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I'd much rather have my issue take an entire month to be resolved than be the cause of the suffering of someone that's working for me without pay. A few months ago, when the maintainer of i3-gaps posted on Reddit that he was burnt out and wasn't going to manage /r/i3 anymore, I made it very clear for him that he was doing the right thing for his mental health. He took a step back to concentrate on what matted the most for him. Everything else can wait. I understand that 100%, and I actually prefer a sane developer who works less than a stressed out one that works more. I don't even mind dismissals per se, just the assholery of some. But paid or not paid, adults must behave like adults.
First, I'm not from the US, and it's not nice to assume that.
Then, if you're getting into the FOSS community, you should realise that you are participating in a quite organic community with its traditions and customs. It is not nice to ask for it to bend to your liking.
Lastly, most of the open source stuff out there is stuff people make for themselves and then share with the community. Nobody needs to be inviting or accomodating, unless it is abusive behaviour, maintainers decide to be helpful or not. And even if it's abusive, you often can only either stop using their code or fork.
I think you need to learn the way the FOSS community operates and realise that these are individuala that have no obligations to you at all. If they tell you to RTFM, then RTFM or give them the middle finger and move on.
I think this is the crux of it. Suffering rejection or perceived rejection isn't fun, but ultimately if you don't like a group then move on. They didn't ask you to show up or join in (sometimes they do and I think it's far more legit to be upset in that case). Yes it would be nicer for you if they welcomed you with open arms, but it is better for them? The answer isn't always yes.
I've definitely come across groups which I have perceived as hostile to my presence nnd for my own sake I just roll on. They don't owe me, I don't owe them.
That's the thing: we do own one thing, and that's basic decency. I'm not asking people to cut me any slack otherwise.
Yes, of course. Users should be considerate of the developers time and do their due diligence before asking questions. But being uncivil to all users is not an acceptable reaction to the bad ones.
And, since it's very hard (or even impossible) to differentiate between laziness and actual struggle, you may as well just treat everyone nicely (and, if you're not able to be civil, just don't engage at all).
It's not.
I disagree. This is not about me. Everyone owes everyone politeness. This is part of a social contract in every human civilized society. Being able to write code does not exclude anyone from that.
I don't know. Will it? You can only find out if you try. For example: to you, what is being polite?
Of course. As you said it yourself, it goes both ways.
I think the central issue is different groups have different standards of politeness. It's ok for me to curse around my friends, but cursing at a church would not be polite. Similarly, telling your boss to RTFM would be rude, but in the open source community it's not considered rude or offensive. The intention of the people saying it to you isn't to offend you.
I don't think telling someone to read the manual is indecent. It's just saying that the answer to the question is in the manual, so go read it. It's not meant to be aggressive or offensive. It's just pointing you to where you can get help because the person you asked doesn't want to donate their time to you, and that's their choice.
Sorry about that. I didn't mean to imply your nationality, but rather refer to the fact that most of the FOSS culture (at least in its origins) revolves around the north-American cultural context.
That's not what I'm doing. This is not about my personal preferences: that's a real issue.
This is common sense, and I happen to agree with it for the most part. But everyone has an obligation to be decent. I find it amusing that this seems like such a novel concept in the OSS world.
This is the behavior of an uneducated child, which I'm not.
That's totally your view, and that might not be the view of the maintainer of that certain project.
Similarly.
That's totally your problem.
I do not endorse any negative behaviour or try to excuse it. The cold hard reality is that these people are under no obligation to be nice to random strangers or accommodate anyone. It's nice when they do, most do most of the time, and I'd do so most of the time, but that's totally them being very nice people. They are way outnumbered, overworked, and under-compensated. They've already given back to the community, thus showing their gratitude as the "code" of FOSS kind-of obliges one. They have no further obligations, including being nice or civil. No licenses oblige that. That's totally up to them.
The thing about this whole pile of code being a "community effort" is that it's being produced by an incredibly diverse and organic group of people. There are many different subgroups within that. Many cultures coexist. One needs to be able to show the due respect, and be amenable and malleable to each community's standards. If those are too low for you, you can:
or you can indeed suggest them to change, but whether or not they do is their decision. It's good for them in many ways to be agreeable, accommodating maintainers, but it's totally up to them to do so. You don't get another choice.
I don't think this is a productive discussion anymore, nothing further can be added. All the facts are stated, and they are independent of you and me.
I don't think we need a license for that, do you? You're being perfectly civil with me, even though there is no law determining your behavior.
I disagree, this seems like an interest and complex subject in regard to human relations. There are people spending their entire lives studying things like that, with different approaches in many different fields. Speech acts, for example. I can't force you to continue discussing it me, though :P
Thanks for the link! I'm paving my way to become a linguist (I've a BA in literature, nowadays studying to get an MA in linguistics the coming academic year), and pragmatics (which includes speech acts) is something I find very interesting. I'll make a note of the link for when I finish the "initiation process", so to speak.
I'm being civil with you because I want, in essence. I value civil discussion, I don't like offending people for no reason (and even when there is a reason, I'm reluctant to offend), and this is simply more productive than a flamewar. This is not unique to me, many people are so (you are, the entirety of Tildes so far is, and that's great!), and especially most people in FOSS are so. But there are those who choose to be less civil and less constructive. I find something like RTFM the word to be too informal for myself to use with some random person reporting me an issue or asking me something, but some find it perfectly fine. My point is, in essence, we don't have much power to make them behave otherwise, other than to abandon their software. And when they're mildly unwelcoming, that's rather justified. That many FOSS people are welcoming and nice does not remove that justification, it's just that those people are being nice regardless.
If this is about the "why" of this sort of interaction, then there's quite a bit to discuss and even research. Why is there such toxicity like that in LKML or OpenBSD mailing lists? The brogrammer culture? The cult of obscurity and difficulty? How on earth can a random group of email addresses or github handles can build something that's working, let alone decent? I'm under the impression that the topic itself was mostly a critique of a certain attitude, not a search for the underlying reasons, judging from the topic text. In that regard, there's not much to discuss, the community behaves in certain ways, and we can not do nothing but suck it up, but also be good examples in the community.
Be careful! Philosophy of language was one of the reasons I dropped out of my MA in literature. I couldn't go any longer studying with a frame of reference I felt was based neither in science nor logic. My literature department was radically post-modern (think Derrida for everything), and I was getting more and more isolated just because I have this terrible habit of only believing things that are true :P
That is also my experience, and my interactions are mostly positive.
My initial intention was to make people understand that, because not everyone can follow the literal advice in RTFM (and similar idiomatics), it might be a good idea to drop the uncivil shenanigans and realize you may be speaking with someone that's not just asking out of laziness.
I think we can do more than just suck up. We can talk about like we are doing right now, and maybe enlighten some good willing people (which I believe is the majority) who act bad more out of ignorance than from a sincere desire be uncivil.
That's actually why I'm moving towards linguistics rather than continuing with literature. At the end of my bachelor's I was thinking that I'd go into comparative literature (I've written a blog post that demonstrates the confusion I was going through back then), the few papers and couple books I've read were very interesting, and I was (and am) interested in how cultures interact, how one perceives and affects another, and how and why one oppresses and removes another. I was nearly applying for a course in another city last August, but I decided to leave it for the next semester for some reason. Then, right after that, I had a chance to reflect on the topic honestly-to-myself, and I found out that I can't really come up with research ideas, even vague, that'd satisfy me, in literature or comparative literature. I started thinking about other possibilities. I was already interested in linguistics since a few years ago, reading bits here and there. I thought I could try looking into it for a while, given I had the time, and maybe study linguistic variation and contact, which would be an interesting means to study the cultural topics mentioned. Slowly, I discovered I loved the field, and over the past few months, studying linguistics using different sources, I did not only discover that I could come up with interesting and fulfilling research questions, but I also developed an interest into more theoretic parts of it.
Linguistics is more sciences than humanities. It's right in the crossroads of biology, psychology and philosophy. It can both yield incredibly material and practical and objective research, but can also be rather philosophical and very abstract. It's the study of the backbone of humanity, and I feel like I'm loving it!
For the rest of your comment, I actually agree. But as I said, to cooperate is not really an obligation for almost all FOSS devs. As much as I despise hostile behaviour, regardless of to whom it's done, I think these people are free to decide whether or not they want to be cooperative and accommodating, or merely publish their software and have a minimum of contact with the community.
Pro tip: When asking a question, be specific about what you've tried. You tried reading the fucking manual? Mention that. Say that you've tried to find the information in there, but can't seem to pin it down, and that the length of the manual + ADHD is making it difficult. If you want to throw them a bone, ask them for a specific section to look at so you know where in the manual you should be looking in the future.
If they're still being assholes, tell them to fuck off and find a less toxic community.
Personally, I gave up on Arch because despite having read the fucking manual and despite explicitly stating so, the only responses I got were some variation of "RTFM", rather than getting actual help. The Arch community is (or at least was a few years ago) pretty toxic and not really worth my time to deal with, so I decided to stick with Ubuntu.
Unfortunately you're going to find elitism from time to time. This is particularly true when the technology you want to use is considered more "difficult" or "advanced" than others, e.g. Arch and the C programming language. Most assholes I run into are usually in those kinds of crowds.
I always do that, and it really helps. Most of the time, people will gladly help me. I'm not on any community that I consider particularly toxic. Even the #emacs folks are usually very nice. I never used Arch, but I'm familiar with the wiki. The "RTFM" mentality seems built into the very core of Arch's philosophy, which might not be necessarily a bad thing if you understand it as a more general DIY without getting all asshole about. But we human beings are great at ruining things.
I have never experienced the Arch community, but I have used Arch in the past (and I use Manjaro on my laptop) and I have to say that the Arch wiki is rather complete and useful, so I never had to go far to find answers. At the same time, due to the wiki being so good it's easy to understand when someone asks a question the community just assumes you haven't read the documentation. On top of that, since Arch is ever changing the documentation is sometimes in flux.
Personally, I would say that anyone who thinks Arch is 'advanced' is fooling themselves. It's a step or two above something like Ubuntu, but plenty of people just build their own OS (that's generally where Distros come from.)
Yeah, it's not really about whether or not something actually is "advanced", it's all about perception. If it takes more effort than what other equivalents do, i.e. it's objectively more difficult relative to the normal alternatives, then elitists will jump all over it. People like to not only feel like they're smart, but smarter than other people, so they tend to gravitate toward anything that separates them from the norm.
Hell, during my college studies the only time anyone has ever blown their lid because people had the audacity to not know what they're doing from the very beginning was in my operating systems class, which was (naturally) a very heavily C-focused class. And I consistently hear people complaining about assholes on StackOverflow, but I seldom ever see them because I'm not sifting through questions for the languages or tools that elitists frequent.
It's kind of just an annoying reality that ego is rampant in tech.
The irony is of course that so many users of 'advanced' distros lack the talent to justify their behaviour. Not that talent is a free pass, but at least the condescension would make a bit more sense.
Heh. I get distracted pretty easily too, but that's never really been a handicap. I've found that not all manuals are created equal. For every three hundred page bible, there's a fifty page zero-bullshit version out there somewhere that's infinitely easier to digest. It's probably a lot more technical and high-level, but if you've worked in tech for a decade or more, that's a bonus and a timesaver, not a hindrance.
Usually, all you really need to get a handle on a new technology is the white paper (to tell you what the fuck it's for / what problems it's aiming to solve), the best practices guide (which is just a list of things not to do when implementing it), and a couple forum threads on the topic to give you a head's up on the 'issues' with the tech that all the people using it are arguing about. Some example implementations are also useful to get up to speed. Once you have that, all you need are a couple days to play with it in a lab environment, and you should be ready to go. You won't be an expert, but you'll be better prepared than most technical people are, and you can learn the rest as you go.
I do own an RTFM hat, though. :P
I feel like I can understand the two arguments being presented. That being said, imagined you have authored some software. People have questions about this software. You have now authored documentation to answer those questions as you've realized that answering them takes time away from doing something else. You can quickly see why it becomes a nuisance to get called upon to answer questions you've answered dozens (!) of times before even after writing documentation to answer the very thing you are asking about.
I feel like the word "manual" has caught a negative connotation for being boring or even useless (even if one recognizes that all manuals aren't created equally: one can't know that without first looking through it).
We no longer live in a world where finding answers in your 800 page manual for your 1998 Ford Windstar has to be done without tools like CTRL+F.
Although I acknowledge the "users can be lazy" argument, from my perspective, it's always been more about simply showing the user that such documentation actually exists. They might not even know.
"RTFM" for me isn't a motto; I don't use the term pejoratively. When I see somebody asking questions, I want to help them. Documentation has been created to answer the exact series of questions they have thought long enough to ask about in the first place, raising awareness by pointing them to a reference they might've not been aware of is a practice that should be encouraged.
I try to be aware of things like the "curse of knowledge" (Wikipedia article), a cognitive bias in which people assume - unknowingly - that others have the prerequisite background knowledge to understand the topic at hand.
But then imagine if Tildes had users coming to the forums every day to ask how they can hyperlink a URL within a post. Pointing them to the documentation in this scenario is a healthy practice.
(Tangentially, I feel the same way thinking about topics like grammar. If I've misused a word, my thinking is that I would want to know about it so I don't make that mistake again. Tact aside, I don't quite understand people who lash out at others for simply letting them know).
I have ADD and a bit of an annoyance of mine is when I see others claim the same use it as a crutch. I have re-read your post and I am not quite sure if you are or not, but thinking about further, some of your comments are a bit dramatic. Let's not pretend that you have to go page-by-page in a 650 page manual when CTRL+F exists.
I just feel that we need to take the "fuck" (and all the gratuitous hostility associated with it) out of the equation. Maybe that's no big deal for anyone in the know, but it's a big deal for people trying to get in. And even though I appreciated your explanation on the less literal sense in which "RTFM" is frequently used, it still carries a literal sense. In my particular case, the actual words can be downright offensive, as I have a disorder which can, quite literally, make it impossible for me to actually read the manual.
But the real issue here is more the culture rather the acronyms itself.
I've been that guy. When I bother to provide support, my habit is to answer the question while also providing a reference to the documentation I used to get the answer. I see it as a reasonable compromise in that I'm giving people the answers they need while pointing them at documentation they could and should be using to help themselves.
But when somebody responds by saying, "I'm not going read all of that. I'm dyslexic, you ableist asshole," they aren't going to get an apology. They're going to get the following:
"I didn't know then, and now I don't feel obligated to care."
TL;DR: If you want me to make allowances for disability, I gotta know you've got a disability in the first place. Something like, "I know this is documented, but I've got ADHD and it can be hard to focus," in your support requests would be helpful.
The crux of the issue is you want people to give up time and energy to accommodate you. I think that's selfish and unreasonable. I understand that your disability sucks and it's unfair, but unfortunately these people have no obligation to change their community to make your life easier.
Ironically, I'm going to very politely suggest you use the "ctrl+f" command with the "mrbig" search, so you can see that I probably agree with most of your positions :)
Yes, I will agree with most of what is said here. I myself am also in the SW development field, so there is some thing to be said about the "RTFM crowd". However, the more I think about it, the more that RTFM makes sense to me. Unfortunatly, there are people that will just loop back to RTFM even though you had read and Ctrl+F the parts you needed, and are asking specific questions regarding something that might not be perfectly understood by you. That said, most people in the community do not mind helping you if you are willing to put in the effort to look things up yourself. RTFM makes perfect sense, and simple questions that could be answered by a quick search are really bad to see. The major challenge is that you are in a field that requires you to be resourceful, so how then are you supposed to be resourceful when you are unable to .. well.. read the fucking manual. If there are further questions after reading the manual and accompanying literature, then there is no reason why a question cannot be asked, but if people are just lazy... well.. that cannot be what the community wants.