A Monday rant on various kinds of opinionated people

This rant is a continuation of last Friday's. You may want to read that first.

Over the years I have participated in several different online forums. For the purposes of this rant, I'll mention three of them: photography, woodworking, and free software development — they all have something in common.

Photography

Years ago I was very much into learning photography, and specifically, street photography. You go out to the streets with your camera in hand, and you perfect your technique so that you can instantly shoot something interesting as it happens, without having to think about what the camera needs — because if you don't do it instantly, then the scene is gone.

I gravitated toward street photography for a few reasons. First, I had just gotten a good camera — my first good camera, not a point-and-shoot "with no controls" — and wanted to learn to use it. Second, I actually liked street photography as had been done by artists like Garry Winogrand, Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Third, although I also liked studio photography, I didn't really feel like spending a lot of money on sophisticated flashes, cables, backdrops, and "exotic" equipment. I liked the idea of going out, just with my camera, and capturing interesting pictures.

This was the year 2000, when the web was a lot smaller. Photo.net was a popular site and I started posting there. It had interesting tutorials, and some lively discussion forums. Most of the forums, though, leaned toward the technical side of things. Gear. Cameras, tripods, lenses, flashes (these last two, "glass" and "strobes", as photographers like to call them).

There are a few big makers of camera systems: Nikon, Canon, Leica, etc., and people get very attached to the system they own. This is understandable; for interchangeable-lens cameras, both cameras and lenses are substantial investments and it's not like you can just throw away or sell your complete system and get a different one. They have different user interfaces, and it is possible to argue endlessly about which system is more usable (knobs vs. buttons vs. barrels that you rotate).

Many people who participated in Photo.net's forums did it only to talk about gear. They had interminable discussions on whether Canon was better than Nikon, while the Leica snobs looked down on them, for Leicas were far more expensive. Every time a new camera model came out, people would argue about the specifications, whether it would solve long-standing gripes about the model's predecessor, whether another older model would be discontinued...

It seemed that people were happy to act as collectors of camera equipment, analyzing and memorizing every technical detail, but paying only casual attention to making photographs.

Arguing about equipment is fun for a while. You learn a lot of technical detail. But once I had inhaled enough technical data about the camera and lenses I owned, I just wanted to take pictures.

With time I picked up a pattern in the discussions. Amateur photographers would argue endlessly about those things, and they didn't seem to post very many pictures. The professional photographers wouldn't argue very much, or if they did get into a discussion, it would be to provide hard, personal evidence about things that worked better for them and in their particular situations. Things that you couldn't figure out from the specs of the equipment. You know, that tripod head wobbles with a lens heavier than N kilograms, which is what you need to do bird photography in this kind of jungle. Watch out, if you go to a mountain with *that* camera, the battery is going to die pretty soon on you because of the cold. This camera is way easier to reload (this was the days of film) when you are wearing gloves. And the pros would definitely post a lot of pictures, very good ones, as you would expect, and using all sorts of brands of equipment.

Eventually I found a mailing list called Streetphoto, which was run by a very competent photographer called John Brownlow. The list had an unwritten rule that you didn't talk much about equipment: you went there to show your photos and get good critiques. People really were able to improve their technique there. You learned about prefocusing (so you didn't have to take time focusing and risk losing the shot), hyperfocal distance (so you could prefocus and have as much depth of field as possible), about rules of thumb for calculating exposure ("sunlight at ISO 100 is f/11 1/125 sec", "cloudy is two f stops wider", "shaded is three stops", "indoors it's seven stops", "with candlelight you either have an f/1 super-expensive lens or you are fucked"), about getting used to the field of view of your favorite lenses so you could predict what would fit in the scene before raising the camera to your eye ("75mm is only your fovea", "50mm is your direct vision", "28mm is your peripheral vision"). You learned how to mentally prepare yourself to go out and shoot people while not appearing like a stalker, you learned what to do should somone complain. It was the first place where I read about "the photographer's rights", which are now widely circulated. And then, there were weekly contests with a certain topic where not only did you get good critiques about your photos, but you also learned to evaluate photos based on something more than technical aspects (not "your exposure is off", but "the subject is not clear, and the composition would be stronger if your had used this angle...").

So, most of the people on that mailing list were amateurs, but there was a distinct lack of mindless discussion about equipment. Conversations sometimes did gravitate toward the technical side of things, but it was more about the practicalities of certain equipment ("this kind of shutter release gives you less camera shake with low shutter speeds") than about battles of the hardware.

Woodworking

A few years ago I started learning traditional, hand-tool woodworking. My brother had made a few bookcases when he was a teenager, and I was always kind of jealous about them. Now, as a busy medical doctor, he had told me a few times that he wished he had really learned to make furniture. That gave me an excuse to learn; maybe one day we could make things together.

I wanted to focus on hand tools as a wishful "plan B" for when peak oil really hits the fan and electric tools no longer work. That, plus I didn't want to spend a lot of money on big, bulky, noisy, dangerous machine tools for which I have no space (and I'm also rather clumsy and careless, and I can totally see myself cutting away a finger on the first days of using an electric circular saw).

I bought a few hand tools — saws, planes, chisels — and started looking for information on how to use them. Online forums seemed to be of two kinds: those focusing on power tools only, and very few ones focused on hand tools. In the power tools ones, there were even people whose posting signatures were actually equipment lists: "20-inch Delta planer, Grizzly 3-horsepower table saw, aircraft-carrier sized jointer". People would brag about the size and horsepower of their tools; they would talk a lot about how to adjust and fine-tune them, and the best brands for each type of machine... and I couldn't see a lot of furniture building being done. In the hand tools forums, people would argue about the best (antique) brands for chisels or planes or saws, how they just don't make them like that anymore, how this or that technique was the best for cutting those trapezoidal joints or for sharpening plane blades ("dovetails" and "irons", respectively, as woodworkers like to call them)...

It seemed that people were happy to act as collectors of woodworking equipment, analyzing and memorizing every technical detail, but paying only casual attention to making things with wood.

And then I found a pretty comfortable forum, the "Neanderthal Haven" area in the Sawmill Creek woodworking forums. There are some extremely skilled people there, always showing off their latest projects, and a great number of hobbyists who actually use their tools to build stuff. In there you can learn the little tricks of the craft, of actually doing the craft, rather than talking like tool collectors only. You learn to build your own workbench as a rite of passage (in any of a number of styles and variations), you learn that there are dozens of sharpening methods and they all work, you learn many ways of cutting different joints and they all work — no need to argue; you can choose among them as they suit you.

Free software

Back in the nineties, when I was still in college and we had a functioning Linux Users Group, we had certain group members who didn't actually do much with free software other than try it out and use it. Whenever they found something annoying in one distribution, or when they could not figure something out, they would chooser another distro. That is all they ever seemed to do: try out distros, reformat their hard drives, and wait until the next version came out.

Years later I learned the term "distro hopper" for that kind of people.

Places like Slashdot, OSNews, Phoronix, LWN, are infested with those people. Free software applications are scarce enough that we don't yet have rabid fans of the GIMP fighting with rabid Krita users (yet — or maybe I'm not looking in the right places for them). But desktop shells and distributions are easy enough to find, and similar enough to each other, that comparing them is just a sport of endurance. See who can amass the greatest amount of meaningless technical detail, and fight it out.

It seems that people are happy to act as collectors of nearly equivalent software, analyzing and memorizing every technical detail, but paying only casual attention to producing things with their computers.

What they do

Those Photographers(tm) would agonize when a new camera model came out, or a new lens came out, and it didn't include (or it included) something that they thought was obvious that should be present (or should have been removed) in that new version. How could the company screw that up!? How could they dare to break compatibility with this or that aftermarket accessory?

Those Woodworkers(tm) would tear their clothes in anger when a new tool came out (by the few remaining makers of high-quality hand tools) and it wasn't exactly like an antique model, or when the cutting edge bevel wasn't just like so, when it broke compatibility with an aftermarket accesory (yes, those exist even for hand tools).

Those Users(tm) will throw a spitting, drooling, kicking-on-the-floor tantrum when a new version of the software comes out and it doesn't include a feature that they were sure would be in the next version, or when it still has something that should obviously have been removed years ago.

And in all three groups, those are often the people that don't produce much at all. They have the equipment, they cherish it, they brag about it, but they don't really accomplish much with it.

I'm not saying that being a collector is bad. There are exquisite collections of things, lovingly kept by careful curators, but they understand their activity. They are happy to give you endless technical or historical detail on their objects of attention. They may even have strong opinions on how things should proceed, should it be the case that whatever they collect is still developed and produced. But unless they take direct part in developing and producing, they remain only collectors.

It turns out that companies, craftsmen, and software developers do pay attention to people who use their products for meaningful means. They don't pay much attention to collectors — because they know that collectors will be happy with whatever is thrown at them, because collecting is what they do.

Given real world evidence...

... we will get stuff fixed. But don't just rant on shit you collect.

TL;DR

This kind of useless-discussion bullshit, with rabid dilettantes, happens in all subjects in online communities. Maybe it seems to happen more in software-related ones because people there are already sitting on their asses in front of the computer, whereas in the others they are out there fiddling with something in the physical world.

By the way

You should read this excellent post and if you have a few afternoons, the whole blog. It is enlightening.