Developers being far less critical of other developers.
We were much more positive in the olden days. Back in the 90s you could post an idea in a developer-oriented usenet group or discussion forum and get pretty decent feedback. If you do that today there's good chance you're going to either get nothing back or you're going to be flamed for using an "anti-pattern". People are far too quick to dismiss things now.
It's probably a function of how everything gets marked with a score now and every post is social proof, but it's quite annoying regardless.
There was a genteel, supportive quality of having a participation base comprised mostly of sincere, interested readers and posters. There were trolls even then, for sure, but they were few and were generally embarrassed into an inert mumbling.
I still remember fondly the debates in comp.lang.c about the first ANSI C standard proposals. Even Henry Spencer's rants against NOALIAS were entertaining.
And where user participation got unproductively unruly, moderated groups served well, like rec.humor.funny.
There was also an open, transparent process for forking groups, generally along natural fracture lines, and for creating new subgroups.
What ultimately ruined Usenet (IMHO) was a falling signal-to-noise ratio, and not just because of spam. The opening of the AOL gateway and the resulting Eternal September proved to be mortal wounds.
We were much more positive in the olden days. Back in the 90s you could post an idea in a developer-oriented usenet group or discussion forum and get pretty decent feedback. If you do that today there's good chance you're going to either get nothing back or you're going to be flamed for using an "anti-pattern". People are far too quick to dismiss things now.
It's probably a function of how everything gets marked with a score now and every post is social proof, but it's quite annoying regardless.