their machine: washing machine
your machine: coffee machine
Even worse when they instead lecture you on why you shouldn’t do that
Don’t agree. Often someone’s problem can be resolved by just doing something else. That doesn’t mean lecturing, but I’ve seen many, many times where someone was having trouble because they were going about something in the wrong way. Sometimes the most-useful help is to step back and say “you may not want to be doing X, and may want to be doing Y”.
The reason why I disagree is that commenters don’t always have the full picture. When I already know exactly what I need, receiving many comments, but none helpful, is exhausting. Sometimes it’d be nice to have help on a specific problem without having to convince strangers of every other choice I made in the path.
An example: I’ve seen people on Reddit ask for help with Linux drivers and be told to buy new hardware entirely. Or ask if a dumbphone supports Whatsapp, and be told to ditch it by Americans who think it’s just another social network that you can opt out of.
”Just use Google. It’s literally the top result!”
Oh boy, you ain’t gonna believe how I found this forum thread.
When that forum is a reddit thread:
“I got it working on my end.”
“How did you solve the problem?”
“This message has been script deleted because reddit was stupid salmon truck cantaloupe spezsucks”
“Wow, that fixed it! Thanks! I have no problems with it now at all!”
God I hate this. The fact that I understand why, doesn’t detract from my annoyance with the result. And worse, a large number of Reddit archives have either stagnated or completely died because of the API cutoff, meaning often times that answer is irrecoverable.
