Yesterday I told the story of what happened on Reddit when my friend Prince Watercress decided to ask a relatively simple tech support question in the Windows 10 subreddit.
To put the relatively long story short, while one person provided actual advice (from their own experience) which didn’t solve the problem but was still helpful, another person (the one who’s username in the original thread is a bunch of random numbers who we have hence referred to as “Captain Shutdown” for brevity sake) decided to just be a jerk, asking why Watercress didn’t just shut down his computer every time he was done using it (the issue was in relation to hibernation) and seemed to imply a bit that he should do such, ignoring the actual question itself. The thread also seemed to hint at either an attitude of “why do this if you have a solid state drive in the computer” or, alternately, a judgemental attitude of “why don’t you have one in your computer?”
Whichever case was more accurate is irrelevant — it was elitism at its finest. The person had no intention of helping with the problem but instead chose imply, basically, that Watercress was using his computer incorrectly, and that he should avoid a feature which he found useful and had not caused him trouble in the past, rather than try to solve the problem and continue to use this otherwise functional feature.
Frustrated at this, Watercress posted in the “Reddit Sucks” subreddit (yes, a section of the site devoted to complaining about the site) to express this frustration at getting no real help from this person who, as both Watercress and I put it, missed the point completely. This thread would prove to be even more of a farce than the previous one. As with the other post, the text Watercress put is long gone, but it told the story in short form much as I did. For perspective, the title of the entry was: “Asking for help on a computer problem. Dude completely misses the point and bitches about how I do a thing. Don’t ask for help here; fuck this site.” Marvelous.
Remember, this is the second half of a two part post. Read part 1 if you haven’t already!
One person responded: “Seriously tho. If you have an ssd why use hibernate. Just leads to more issues” which tells me that Watercress had mentioned the implied obsession with SSD’s that our “Captain Shutdown” seemed to have.
This person seems to be under the impression that hibernate is problematic as well (which it can be, but no more often than any other aspect of Windows) and presumed Watercress has a Solid State Drive in his system, which he does not. He tells the person as much by replying: “I don’t have an SSD. Try again.” to which the person, in what is certainly a friendly tone (something lacking on the other thread) replies “I hiiighly recommend one. Best upgrade you can do to a computer they’re so cheap now there’s not really a reason not to. Hit windows key type cmd. Right click, run as admin Type: powercfg.exe /hibernate on“
Okay, that was at least nice enough. No ill will to them, they gave a recommendation in a polite enough way, no big. Even provided a quick command line entry to restore hibernation if Watercress were to upgrade to one. Neat.
Now we move on to where things get bad. In the previous article we mentioned someone who seemed to come out of nowhere and throw their two cents in. We will call them, for the sake of interest, “Mr. Class.” Well, this is where that person came from — they found this post and then followed Watercress’ account back to the original thread to chime in with their vapid idiocy.
“PrinceWatercress said, “Either help me with my problem…” What are you talking about? The person was trying to help you. Just because it’s not the help you were looking for doesn’t mean the person was wrong to say what they did. The problem with reddit sucking in this case is with the original poster (aka, you). You should have made it clear that shutting off your computer is not an option. When someone offers you good advice on reddit, that does not count as an example of reddit sucking. Come back to this subreddit when it’s no longer you that makes reddit suck.”
Okay, let’s tear this one apart.
What is he talking about? Watercress was talking about the fact that what was stated by Captain Shutdown was not advice in any form but simply an assertion that he was the source of his own issue; an absurd idea, to say the least, when it was a change brought on by a Windows update which created the problem that Watercress was, again, able to fix!
I contend that Captain Shutdown was wrong to say what he did, primarily because of how he said it, but also the fact that it provided no actual help – it was simply an assertion that he should do X to avoid the problem all together, regardless of how it impacted his computer usage. Captain Shutdown basically asserted that Watercress was doing things wrong by using a feature of Windows as it was designed. How does that even make sense?
To say that the problem was with Watercress equally makes no sense. I’ll repeat again that no actual advice was given by either the above person nor “Captain Shutdown!” That’s what keeps being missed here by this guy — what was said on the other thread, the “Why do you even use hibernation, just shutdown your pc“ line, was not advice on solving an issue. Period. I can’t stress that enough.
Mr. Class went on to say “You should have made it clear that shutting off your computer is not an option.” This made me laugh because of just how hard this guy missed the point. It is an option, obviously, but it would disrupt his workflow too much to do such. That should be obvious from the fact that he chooses to use hibernate — he isn’t trying to “speed up” startup as he knows that’s not a “fresh” boot, he simply wishes to get back to working on projects he is in the middle of with minimal interruption — along with power savings, this is the very thing that the sleep and hibernate functions even exist for! It should be obvious he chooses this for a reason and that reason is important. How dense is this guy?
Mr. Class goes on to suggest Watercress come back to this subreddit “when it’s no longer you that makes reddit suck.” A statement which is par for the course from the kind of asshole this guy sounds like.
Watercress follows this with all he needed to say: “And you just missed the entire point. Thanks.” which is correct – the guy did miss the entire point, certainly intentionally.
He replied with “Nice deflection” (which it wasn’t) and that was the end of that. Watercress, having had enough of this shit (he’s had a similar experience in the past on reddit which I can, again, assure you was not him doing anything other than asking a sensible question) decided to delete his account and leave the site. I can’t blame him in the least — I’ve only really ever posted on reddit for the rare occasion one of my articles makes it on there, and while people have been nice to me this is a side effect of them being people who chose to share my content to support a discussion — a positive start, rather than people coming out of nowhere to attack me.
Still, I avoid the site in all regards possible as I fundamentally disagree with every website of this type. They breed negativity, elitism, and the like, I’m just getting too goddamn old for that kind of childish shit.
I would say this is where our story ends but last night Watercress got curious and looked up our friend, Mr. Class, a bit more. What was found pretty well explained things. It would seem our friend Mr. Class looks to be a bit on the backwards side of logic. I’ll avoid discussing his post of being a “Declarationist” (which, incidentally, has zero replies) as I don’t wish to get too deep into politics here, but I will touch on this other thread titled ” reddit, do NOT suppress freedom of speech“ where Mr. Class posts as follows:
I was reading their blog about quarantined threads. This is what reddit wrote as an example of something that might get quarantined, “(eg, the Holocaust did happen and the number of people who died is well documented).
“It is completely possible that the Holocaust is a well-documented conspiracy, and reddit has no way of knowing whether or not this is the case. What would you rather be true: that the Holocaust REALLY did happen, or that it was just a conspiracy to teach us wisdom?
Do not misread this: I am ranting about reddit’s suppression of freedom of speech. Perhaps, it’s time we find a new platform that respects and honors a diversity of opinions, particularly opinions that we may not agree with or do not like. Isn’t that when freedom of speech is needed most?
…are you fucking serious? I won’t claim he is trying to explicitly say anything about the Holocaust, but to even flirt with the idea in any capacity that it didn’t happen as it did is not just typical conspiracy grade stuff, but monstrous, to say the least of what I think. Seriously, he’s touching dangerously close to showing at least a positive opinion of Holocaust Denial!!!! A better example could have been chosen, and even daring to use that for his “point” tells me he damn well may consider it some kind of conspiracy (even if he claims for someone to not “misread” what he said) and while I already have no patience for conspiracy theories and the lunatics behind them, this crosses several lines with me. Given his interactions in the Watercress threads, I’d expect nothing less from a nimrod of this exceptional grade of abject stupidity. I get that it’s being used as an example here, but the phrasing and proposition of “which would someone rather be true” (rather than what actually is true) is.. unsettling, shall we say.
And that’s it. That’s the entire thing. Sorry to end on such a dark note, but damn…
To answer a few final questions, you may be wondering why Watercress doesn’t just upgrade to an SSD? I can’t speak for him, but I’d imagine it’s simply the act of dealing with it all. He’s not a tech enthusiast like me, and while I have no doubts he could go through the process of cloning and upgrading, the chances of something going wrong make it not worth him to lose productivity. That’s really the core of it, if I had to guess, as he likes to stay busy. That simple.
Lastly, as I must always stress, if you’re wondering why I even spent the time to write these two articles, it’s simply a chance to have some fun and help a friend feel better about a negative experience. It also acts as a demonstration of the kinds of things I hate about most online discussion and by going in depth with my tear down allows me to point out very specific problems with how the discussion went. Is it excessive? Sure, but I’m a thorough person — it’s the nature of someone analytical, after all. I do have fun with these little chances to tear apart just why how someone is wrong, or why what they said is, for lack of a better term, idiotic. It’s something I do from time to time, and this was a prime case study in being a jerk online.
That’s about that. More to come, as always. Below are the links to the threads, archived for your convenience.
The thread discussed in this article
The previous posts thread (AKA the one that started it all) (see the related post here)