Coping with Community Decision to Upvote Rude Comments

Question

I opened this Meta question in response to a P.SE question that was locked.

I believe that I laid out a dispassionate and objective argument that the whole rollback/edit history/locking issue was not handled properly by the moderator involved. My argument consisted of referencing a blog post, "Good Subjective v. Bad Subjective Questions" specifically because this post is linked directly from the P.SE "on-topic" page and was the only direct reference there that seemed relevant to my question.

Now, I am happy to admit that my line of thinking and my argument might be incorrect. I don't believe they are incorrect, but they still could be. But regardless of the arguments' rightness or wrongness, I think it is indisputable that they are dispassionate references to P.SE's endorsed community standards and my interpretation thereof.

Again, my interpretation and everything else could be wrong, but I was trying to make a serious argument.

To my surprise, the user @GlenH7 feels that I am being "impetuous" and "petulant", evidenced in his comment on the post (as of 11 am EST today).

Your impetuous and petulant meta question and comments are ... disappointing. I had written up a fairly length answer which I realized was just bashing you. The short version is this: you're wrong regarding your question on main and the basis behind your meta question is tenuous at best. 3 of the 5 mods have weighed in and called your crap out. Several high rep users, included the site's highest rep user, have called your crap out. Stop defending an untenable argument and try to learn from what the community is offering you. – GlenH7 12 hours ago

And this comment received 2 upvotes.

I could try to make an itemized list of why this comment is categorically inappropriate (for example, the entirely non-sequitur mention of this 'answer' @GlenH7 wrote up that was "just bashing me." In addition to being mean, that's entirely irrelevant. Who cares about an answer you were going to but ultimately did not write. What possible use is it to mention to me that you were going to write a post bashing me but then did not?)

But at this point I feel like it's no use.

Does the community at large have advice for me on how to cope with this? I really, very seriously, feel pretty depressed by the entire thread of comments and answers at the meta question link. There are serious argumentative fallacies present in virtually all of the answers; ones that I've taken great pains to address.

Now, if the end result of that thread was just that everyone still thought I was wrong, then so be it. But that's not the result of the thread. The result is that people want to write answers that are "just bashing me", not publish them, and then tell me that that's what they were going to do.

And then two other people upvoted them for that!

How is a user supposed to cope with a community like that?

Answer 1

Solution: Flag the rude comments, then move on.

Answer 2

Rudeness and offensive comments are absolutely not tolerated and should be flagged for moderator attention. We take this kind of thing very seriously.

With that being said I think the "welcome" you have received here may have been because of your tenacity in being heard, your strong convictions about what you feel is right and wrong, and your passionate emotive language. These are not necessarily bad properties of a person and we certainly welcome debate, but I do think you may have been misunderstood.

Your passionate emotive language combined with your tenacity for debate are probably being mistaken for passive-aggressive. Perhaps people believe your ego was bruised and that you had a deep controlled anger about what happened with your question (by controlled I mean masking your true emotions with colorful and descriptive language). Perhaps people felt that you weren't being very direct or straightforward with what was really bothering you, that you were angry about your question being modified in a way and for reasons you do not understand. The anger driving the tenacity that produced 10's of comments and multiple meta discussions.

I am not saying you are that kind of person, but I tell you that there are those that fit that description and still find the opportunity to stir trouble on Programmers from time to time, for what reason I do not know. I don't believe you are a troll, but perhaps some people mistook your demeanor for the similarities in other users that cause trouble here.

My advice to you is to ask questions on meta where you are confused about what is going on and where the Help documentation is not clear, and take a concerted effort to really listen to what your peers are trying to tell you. Look at situations from a clear mind and try to consider the others perspective on what is going on. Then evaluate the true impact of the other users actions on content that you had contributed and ask yourself if it is really that big of a deal.

I hope to see you become an active contributing member of the community some day.

Answer 3

Your depression largely stems from the fact that you've arrived at Stack Exchange with some invalid assumptions, premises and preconceived judgments, which you probably obtained by participating in other online forums.

Stack Exchange doesn't seek to be a "me too" forum. In fact, the goals are quite the opposite. Where forums will allow you to post almost anything, Stack Exchange prefers to be more discerning, allowing only those posts that add value to the community. Where forums allow you to entirely control the content of your posts, Stack Exchange prefers a more collaborative approach, allowing trusted users to cull, curate and improve content.

Stack Exchange is the anti-forum, in other words. Everything you learned in those forum environments is essentially wrong.

The reason this is causing you depression is that you came here expecting the medium (the Stack Exchange software and its participants) to bend to your will and your own purposes. It simply doesn't work that way here.

The way out of the depression is to get to know the SE platform on its own terms, understand how it works, and then decide if it is personally worthwhile for you to participate on that basis.