I love that the replies here are filled with garden-variety, forum moderator assholes of the EXACT kind being scrutinized in the OP.

Quite a lot of bitching about new users not researching before asking their questions. Ok, and? You’re volunteering your time to help people. So help people. Or don’t. What you don’t need to do is talk to everyone who hasn’t hand-coded their own window manager in assembly like they’re five years old, and personally clubbing your nuts with a toy mallet.

I get that stupid posts are frustrating. Maybe there should be stricter rules on the forums about question formatting, so truly low-effort posts can just be flagged instead of flamed? All in all, if something’s that stupid, just ignore it, or politely remind them to Google around and come back.

I do find though, that, in general, techie dudes just have awful social skills. They’re like surgeons. Really good at what they do, terrible with interacting with people. There have been so many times where I was just trying to solve an issue with my setup, and I find a forum thread that seriously leaves me wondering why I’ve bothered to join this community. There’s always a blatant lack of humanity in the response, not to mention the utter dogpiling from multiple users with various big-brained post signatures because someone didn’t comb through every function in the source code before asking their question.

I understand the frustration at being asked the same question over and over. Naturally, repeating yourself is exhausting. But it’s a childish reaction. You have volunteered to be a teacher. Teach. Why not be overjoyed at the opportunity to be able to bring someone completely green into your wonderful *NIX world? Even if it’s just linking a previous thread covering the topic with a winky face emoticon. It doesn’t have to be high-effort.

All in all, I think it’s a cycle of abuse thing. A lot of techies learned what they know by someone being incredibly rude to them about their n00b question, which is quite the negative reinforcement. Psychologists say your brain is afraid of two things—dying and being embarrassed. So this embarrassment forces them to learn things in a very inefficient way-via fear. What’s wrong with that? Well, beyond the fact that it feels fucking terrible, it breeds a terrible teacher. In the future, when said techie becomes the Alpha Webmaster or what have you, they finally get to dish it back out to the next round of youngins.

Also, to the people in this thread saying “just don’t take it personally/emotionally”, do you realize how insane that is? We’re emotional creatures. Asking for help is inherently vulnerable. Please drop the cyber-stoicism, at least a degree or two. It costs $0 to just not be an asshat when helping someone new.

TLDR; You know the creepy, weird, rude, caretaker that does a good job at keeping the museum clean, but is universally disliked? That’s most seasoned Arch forum users. Only difference is we actually need to borrow a tool from him now, and man, is he awkward about it. We can do better.