food for thought

Napoleon Complex of the intellectual variety.

These people place great importance on their intellectual ability and technical knowhow, but are very insecure about their lack of actual accomplishments.

So this tends to come out in a couple different ways.

The most common way is to find projects or technical aspects of "linux" that they don't like and then aggressively critize and go after developers and projects.

The unspoken assumption is that if they find are able to find flaws and critize people who are better then them (people who actually put forth effort and time necessary to accomplish things) then that puts them on equal standing.

This is, of course, incredibly delusional and on a certain level they know it. The resulting cognative dissonance just bruises their ego more and ends up reinforcing the behavior.

So much more that the mere passing mention of a project or software or person they don't like will tend to send them into tirads as they try to goad other people into engaging with them.

The other, and even more pathetic, thing they tend to do is also go after people they see as less themselves.

Because, in their own mind, the more insecure and stupid they make other people look the more secure and accomplished they make themselves feel.

Remember all of this stems from a sense of insecurity and immaturity. They need to grow up and get over themselves and learn better coping mechanisms.

There is no real justification for going out of your way to insult people on help forums.

Technical communities tend to attract people who are socially inept. Society is chaotic and uncontrolled and there are people out there that do and say things that are unpredictable. It is stressful and full of unspoken rules and nuance that is difficult to pick up on. This is especially stressful for young men whose emotions, hormones, lack of experience, and lack of social standing. Being insecure around other people makes people feel very insecure about themselves.

Where as technical/gaming stuff tends to have rules and behaves in a more predictable and controlled fashion. This makes them much more comfortable subject/pastime for insecure young men to "retreat into".

So much so that these types of people tend to want to layer even more rules and more predictable behavior on top of it. They like to create their own rules and try to apply them universally to games (you are not playing the game right) they play or software they use (you are not supposed to use it that way) or communities they operate in, etc.

Most people tend to grow out of this stage with experience.

But there is always a new crop of people coming in so it is a problem that isn't ever going away. For every person that realizes that putting in the effort of being nice is 100% worth it, you have a new user coming in with a chip on his shoulder.