Smart Questions in Detail

From StoneHome

Or, The Passive-Aggressive Sadist's Guide to Looking Like Less of an Asshole on IRC.

What am I looking at?

This document is rather clearly spurred by the better known document by Eric Raymond entitled How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. It would not be unreasonable to call this document a rip-off; I tend to prefer to think that it simply serves a less well understood and very different consumer base, like ebonics or the French deodorant market. As an IRC user, I see Eric's document much in the way that one might see a zip gun in WW2: it's the right idea, but it's neither big enough nor mean enough to mop up the job at hand. In order to keep an IRC idiot's attention, you have to amuse and humiliate them at the same time, which isn't easy given the amusement and humiliations they each regularly undergo on IRC.

Besides, ESR is a nice guy. He won't say things they way they need to be said in order to get through to the people which don't already know them. He wants to be, y'know, polite, which never works with this class of people. Much like you don't go to a Hell's Angel with an inquiry, a petition or the word prithy, you don't go to IRC with "choose carefully," "make it easy to," the concept of meaningful, et cetera. The average message on IRC is generally backed by about two seconds of thought; one has to actually show them what goes wrong before the jackhats will actually try acting like adults. Also, it helps to remind them that none of their tricks are new. So, in my biassed eyes, this is at best the White to ESR's Strunk, or at worst a shaky translation from thoughtful to 1337 with whatever is the behavioral equivalent of a heavy peppering of Engrish.

Oh, so someone sent me to this page to nag me?

Well, yes and no. We have much better places to send idiots. If you were sent here it was as a sort of crash remedial social education, on the basis that you might still be salvagable.