Civility in Times of Change

In the past 12 months, has the FIRST community become more hostile or less civil towards its members?

The world is changing. The United States now has a president that bullies people on twitter. Is this mindset bleeding into FIRST?

Edit: Before I get too many PMs about it, yes, I know that I constructed this poll poorly. There should have been options for “Hostility decreased” and “There was no change in hostility.” My apologies.

A bit of context for this poll would help.

Not sure it’s any more then it always has been. Just different key players.

Also I think a lot of times “hostility” or “personal attacks” on CD are often characterized that way despite it not being the case.

Communication is a two-way street. There’s always been a level of snark on CD that I’ve not been a fan of.

There has always also been a group willing to encourage true personal attacks and excuse them as everything but. I’m sure we all have a couple threads in mind when reading that statement.

I went with a poll because I haven’t been on CD or in FIRST long enough to tell. It’s hard to make a statement from my 5 years when many of the people here have been FIRSTers since before I was born.

Subjectively, I think these forums peaked in vitriol around the announcement of 2Champs. People were displeased with FIRST’s decision, and let that seep into their discussions with those who held other viewpoints.

Objectively, it’s hard to measure.

Also subjectively, there’s been plenty of belittling on these forums for a very long time. You could find some downright mean posts in the mid-2000s.

There’s probably an argument for both options.

All in all, FIRST has grown a lot in the last several years. The program is bigger than it’s ever been [citation needed]. With more people being involved, there will be more complaints - people like to complain.

For all the salt you might see from me, I think FRC is an incredible community and program and I love it to death. It’s absolutely changed my life for the better, and I’m not speaking alone there. FIRST has so much going for it and I could go on forever about how great it is.

We all want to see the program be the best it possibly can be, but sometimes people have different views on how to achieve that (and that’s okay).

What?
Toward who?

It’s the internet – some people are just snarkier here than they would be while standing in full view of several other humans, discussing exactly the same topics.

As Nick points out, that has not changed much in 15 years, but individuals do change. In most cases, I have observed that people develop skills for civil discourse as they gain experience. But there are certainly exceptions to that trend. Some younger members are among the most thoughtful and diplomatic posters here, and some old curmudgeons remain set in our salty ways.

CD Limits the length of a poll question. Take a look at the first sentence of the accompanying post.

As a curmudgeon stuck in his ways I have found myself having a lot less tolerance for stupid questions and statements that are provably false.

I’ve tried to soften it with self deprecating humor but sometimes the statement is just too ugh.

Course the level of novelty accounts or People with fake teams/numbers doesn’t help. I’ll give a thought before calling someone who maybe doesn’t know better out on their crap but if it’s someone who mostly “wil paynes” all over the place I just don’t bother to hold back.

And for the record - there’s nothing wrong with wil payning. Just be right when you do it.

Wil Payne is a Russian troll!

I kid. I’m actually the Russian troll and Wil Payne is really a botnet run by Zebracorn students. No one has ever seen him in person.

Is this really a question we need to ask?

I haven’t been involved in FIRST for very long but our community is one of the nicest, most welcoming, and most “graciously professional” groups I have ever been a part of.

Sure here on CD people say things that aren’t always nice and people disagree but that happens all over the internet. The difference between the FIRST community and the general community is that if you physically meet the person you disagree with, the conversation with the FIRSTer will almost certainly be civil and kind. Yeah, CD has some snark, but it’s significantly less than the rest of the internet.

The FIRST community is excellent and I don’t think anything could change that.

In all these years on CD I have yet to see a single post, a single thread that rivals what I see every morning on my (carefully curated) Twitter feed. CD has a score of 2/10 on my vitriol meter. I greatly appreciate the (mild) pushback on ideas, CAD drawings, and game design. It has helped me become a better coach.

Twitter is about as low a bar as one can possibly set, as far as standards of discourse are concerned.

I’m actually a Schreiber alt

I’m actually an Andrew Lawrence alt

I’m actually a NN run by 900.

No doubt. Facebook is pretty low as well. But they dominate, and CD is the antidote as far as I am concerned.