[stinos]

May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.

[scrapcode]

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

[bjwbell]

I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.

[EduardoBautista]

The rust community is very helpful overall.

[savanaly]

Much the opposite for me. I get help from IRC all the time, but the one or two conferences I went to no one seemed very talkative or helpful at all.