On Mon, 25 Aug 2025 at 19:07, 7riw77--- via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
In addition to others mentioned, I'll visit reddit.com/r/networking on occasion. New networking folk seem to gravitate towards that forum. I tried this for a bit ... it was largely a matter of people trying to get "upvotes" rather than reasoned conversation, and newcomers were actively discouraged from speaking.
I figured it would be another space I could contribute, particularly to newb's, but I dropped out after a couple of weeks. My answers are always too "nuanced" and tradeoff oriented, which doesn't get upvotes.
I got the same feeling from stack exchange networking and stopped using it entirely after a few moments of active use. Gamifying aspects is problematic, because people are often competitive and if you need help you are almost certainly not well equipped to evaluate competency of an answer but you have to rely on some attribute substitution. Particularly nasty aspect of gamification is that people who have high scores might be incentivized to downvote other people with high scores, in an effort to 'win' them. Of course there are upsides in gamification as well, but more thought needs to be put in on how to gamify while avoiding some of the nastier traits we humans exhibit during competitions. -- ++ytti