Thoughts on the effect and effectiveness of ranting
I’m intrigued by posts like this fix-our-goddamn-Rails-tickets-you-lazy-non-contributing-user rant and Zed’s shut-up-and-learn-C-you-noob rant. I find them relatively tactless, as I’m sure others do, but that says nothing about their effectiveness.
As a writer, it’s a classic value judgment: one one hand, you’re lowering the level of discourse; on the other hand, that may be what’s necessary to reach the pathologically uninformed. From a writer’s perspective, how many new Rails contributors or interested C programmers would justify that kind of entry? I’m reminded of an ESR post I read a while back:
I listened to the others on the channel offer polite, reasoned, factually correct counterarguments to this guy, and get nowhere. And suddenly…suddenly, I understood why. It was because the beliefs the ignoramus was spouting were only surface structure; refuting them one-by-one could do no good without directly confronting the substructure, the emotional underpinnings that made ignoramus unable to consider or evaluate counter-evidence.
Fighting against people’s irrationally-held positions with well-reasoned arguments can be ineffective. When you combine this phenomenon with the web’s insatiable attention to conflict and drama, trollish writing is a predictable and potentially effective result. Especially on the web, infamous and famous aren’t far apart.
April 12th, 2010 at 10:41
I think ESR (and you) are right that direct responses can be unpersuasive if what’s being discussed explicitly isn’t the motivating issue. But while you certainly need to choose a better target, I don’t see any evidence that anger and derision are more effective at hitting that target.
For me, it’s too hard to tell whether writing a rant is simply an act of succumbing to frustration or a genuine attempt to improve something. The anger sure suggests the former. Email and blogging, where you compose in isolation, make it so easy to compose a rant while indulging in the fantasy of a crushed, chastened, enlightened opponent that I think people lose track of how often it really turns out that way.
April 12th, 2010 at 16:39
@Jim: It’s possible that through the former (succumbing to frustration) you illicit the empathy of others and genuinely improve things. Knowing that, you can simulate frustration to achieve the same outcome.
Agreed it’s difficult to find evidence for these kinds of things. I hope modern psychological research places a more in-depth focus on the interwebz.