[mwfunk]

One reading of this is that people in open source JS community should be more professional, but I think you could make similar complaints about electronic communities in general. A blogger in 1999 writing about woodworking might have had similar complaints about feedback from random readers on the Internet.

If you put anything out there on the Internet and encourage people to read it/use it/whatever, you will inevitably be surprised and repulsed by how nonconstructive and uninformed some of the feedback is. Web development might be worse than other fields in this respect because there's just that many more amateur, narcissistic, toxic teenagers (in spirit at least) who don't know what they don't know diving into it, who are going to be somewhat more focused on getting cheap upvotes on Reddit with angry rants than actually creating things.

I don't know what the solution is. Some forums have higher SNRs than others, and while I often enjoy Reddit, I have no expectation that the people posting to programming subreddits are any better as a group than people who posted to Slashdot in 1999. If you do anything and tell anyone about it, some bonehead on Reddit is going to take issue with it and write an angry, uninformed, thoughtless screed about how everything is terrible and it's all your fault. You'll find some gems in places like Reddit as well, but it's just such a random stew of people that you have to take it all with a huge grain of salt.

I agree with just about everything in the article, but given the number of Reddit quotes used as examples, part of the author's problem is taking Reddit too seriously or assuming that a given community on Reddit is a reflection of a larger programming community, whereas often the opposite is true. Oftentimes the people that post the most have the least to say, on Reddit (and the Internet in general), as in life.