I’ve been following some retro electronics hobbyist pages on Facebook, and also getting served a lot of posts from pages I don’t follow; I like it better than the low-effort AI slop and tales of pet abuse (asking for money for humane shelters and whatnot) I was getting served a few months ago. Yeah, I know Facebook is the dreg of the internet, but there’s just enough interesting content from these groups and pages that I stay on it.
One of the things you’ll see pretty often in comments and discussions, on these retro tech pages and the like, is people pretty harshly putting down questions they perceive as low effort, or coming from “resellers” or “scalpers,” instead of real hobbyists.
I saw one post in a vintage computer group where a young guy had bought a 1980s or early 1990s IBM PC clone. He was asking what it was and what it might be worth, and described it as “not having any ports” (or something to that effect). The comments were overwhelmingly to the effect of, you ignorant young’un, that’s a PC, you don’t even know what those ports on it are!
I guess there are two ways of interpreting what’s happening here, and in many other similar exchanges: one is that a bunch of people who know the answer, and whom it would cost nothing to give the answer, instead withhold it and make fun of the guy who doesn’t know yet.
It’s like a non-politics version of that annoying “I’m offended by your comment, but I’m not going to explain to you why, you have to do the work” thing. In other words, it’s just a variety of gatekeeping, taunting someone with your knowledge without sharing it, because the hazing is the point. Nobody ever told me everything, why should anybody tell you everything? Do the work.
But of course there is another way to look at it, which is probably how the people answering a little rudely are actually seeing it. It’s more like, this young whippersnapper who can’t even recognize a computer from a few years before he was born is trying to mooch off of experienced people who know and like this stuff, probably just to flip it for a quick buck. Why should we help him out?1 You could put it this way: if he’s trying to just sell the thing, he can look it up himself. If he’s trying to get into retro computing as a hobby, he should know he actually has a computer!
There’s another one of this genre of exchange I remember, from a tube television enthusiast group.2 The question was from a guy doing an estate sale or a house cleanout or something, and he came across a pretty nice old tube TV in the house; the gist of the post was that he was asking the tube TV enthusiasts how they would price it for reference.
People kind of