Being pro-social on the indie web
TL;DR If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don't say it online.
Someone emailed me a question about an article I wrote back in 2017. I wrote a simplistic response back, and all I got in response was a wordy email to tell me I'm wrong in many ways.
I don't know about you, but that's not pro-social behaviour on many levels:
- I don't know you from a bar of soap, and you immediately want to launch into deep debate where every statement has to be analysed for absolute truth instead of general heuristics. Is this how you make friends?
- When you reach out to someone like this, you're asking them to spend a decent amount of their day's mental effort on you. You're launching out of the gate with negative social capital. Of course chances are you won't get an elaborate response back. You're doing the same thing most bad cold callers and emailers do.
- I used to be like this myself, setting up questions to people just to tell them about my superior opinion. Then I grew up and learned how to actually make friends and get a date.
And then, when I call out the bad behaviour, the only response is to call me stupid:
I've debated whether or not to share who this is, but I have a suspicious feeling several other Bear users will have received similar odd communication from this same person, so I won't air the dirty laundry further.
If you're really curious, contact me to ask and share your story, we'll see if the clown car is stopping by all the Bear blogs in town.
This is the negative side of putting contact info public, which we have to accept.