That culture of being "snots" comes from engineers in the real world. The one where this kind of attention to detail means buildings fall on people.
I agree that maybe it's not necessary to carry over that cultural legacy to the internet, although so far it's worked pretty well.
If social pressure (public shaming) isn't the answer then what kind of pressure should be used? Public shaming is a pretty civilized way to enforce rules when you have no top down control that dictates those rules, I can't think of any alternatives that would be less harsh.
According to some the latest hn posts about facebook, in our industry you're doing something wrong if the building doesn't fall over from time to time ; ).
Public shaming can be a good idea, especially on people who are knowingly breaking the rules and holding back progress (See IE6).
However, I'm just glad people are creating APIs, especially because basically no one gets REST right anyways (Hint: if you can't click around your api in firefox with the JSONView extension, it's probably not RESTful).
I agree that maybe it's not necessary to carry over that cultural legacy to the internet, although so far it's worked pretty well.
If social pressure (public shaming) isn't the answer then what kind of pressure should be used? Public shaming is a pretty civilized way to enforce rules when you have no top down control that dictates those rules, I can't think of any alternatives that would be less harsh.