Is making personal attacks ever justified?

Question

I'll admit, I'm writing this question out of frustration and that's never a good start.

I've spent some time away from U&L partly for personal reasons, and partly because a user launched a tirade of baseless and frankly libellous personal attacks against me¹ leaving me a bit shaken. When I came back months later I began to notice that the atmosphere here feels much less friendly than I remember. Maybe I changed maybe U&L has a little.

Besides the rise in bizarre close votes², I'm particularly concerned at an apparent rise in in personal remarks (personal attacks). One in particular has stood out to me as totally uncalled for:

OK, there's [technology] but it's far beyond your capabilities

Yes this may not have been intended as a personal attack, but the wording reeks of elitist "if you have to ask you'll never know". It constitutes baseless³ attack and is really rude, especially to a new user. What's worse is that it not only attacks the OP of the question but any future reader who happens to come along with the same question.

It bugs me that the same intent could easily have been worded without attacking the OP: "OK, there's [technology] but it's far beyond most common users". With no knowledge of the OP's background, and no supporting comment as to the complexity of [technology] the statement unjustly implies incompetence. It's rude!

I've ended up writing this post after the flag I raised for "rude or abusive behaviour" was rejected ⁴. That decision sends me a worrying message that personal attacks are acceptable.(explained)

Rather than trying to rant about one specific incident, what concerns me the most is that without careful moderation forums inevitably slide into clicky (cliquey) elitist behaviour. Right now I feel that U&L is headed down that path an we are getting a bit too comfortable with rude behaviour⁵.

---

1. Untrue statements such as "You've only worked on one software project", "you've never done [xyz] development", ...
2. I'm still waiting for anyone to tell me how "are Linux drivers available for [specific hardware]" is "opinion based"
3. The new user's question, and others they had made gave no picture of their capability as a software engineer
4. Rarely a good reason to start a meta post, yet here I am
5. It's not my intent to blame moderators new and old, but to call out a particular concern about the state of U&L as I see it.

Answer 1

To answer the stated question, no, personal attacks are never justified. Specifically on Stack Exchange, they are explicitly forbidden by the Code of Conduct:

No name-calling or personal attacks.

Focus on the content, not the person. This includes terms that feel personal even when they're applied to content (e.g. “lazy”).

The CoC is broader than that:

No subtle put-downs or unfriendly language.

Even if you don’t intend it, this can have a negative impact on others.

Even toning down the comment that was directed at you wouldn’t make it acceptable, in my opinion.

I think in general that many situations would benefit from the advice given at the start of the CoC:

Be inclusive and respectful.

Avoid sarcasm and be careful with jokes — tone is hard to decipher online. Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain. If a situation makes it hard to be friendly, stop participating and move on.

The last sentence in particular — not for you specifically, Philip, but in general.

I suspect it’s also worth bearing in mind the purpose of comments here, i.e. to help improve posts, not to host discussion, let alone attacks. Just like a good project is defined with its demise in mind, a good comment on Stack Exchange is written with a clear path to its deletion in mind.

Answer 2

I am the moderator that declined that flag.

I misread "it's far beyond your capabilities" as "it's far beyond our capabilities", and I interpreted it as "it's something beyond the scope of this site". I did this even though I read the text several times.

I declined the flag because I couldn't see how saying "describing this technology is beyond the scope of what this site is for" was abusive.

I'm not perfect, and I agree with you that certain personalities don't always end up being very helpful when what they want to do is to show off rather than help. It's also unfortunate that many users tend to prefer writing short snappy answers rather than longer answers that would allow them to be more nuanced.

We (users on this site) can never be the judges of someone else's intellect or ability to understand. To say that something's beyond someone's capability to comprehend is not in line with the site's Code of Conduct.

Apologies for my handling of this flag and for the fact that declining this flag in error triggered your meta post, which I'm largely agreeing with.

Answer 3

When somebody is not nice, invites others to not be nice too. Then the comment sections can be a battlefield of insults and personal attacks. Answers with personal references. Editing wars. Flags being raised. People angry and hurt. Moderators have to intervene. And then it all can be quickly go to hell.

CoCs and moderators are there to avoid this kind of scenario. Being nice is not because it's the right thing to do, or to pretend to be well intentioned, or because nowadays anybody can be a "snowflake". It's a strategy for sites like SE to work well and not become youtube.

Social interactions are very complex, we depend on gestures, voice tone and general body language to guess the intention of our interlocutors. This is absent in the virtual world, making more difficult to interpret the real intentions of what is being said. Because of this, the inevitable second guessing in this kind of forum is a waste of time to everybody, since it's up to discussion, negative emotions and the need of third parties to intervene.

Leave personal references, attacks, and insults to personal relations and youtube. It shouldn't be that difficult. If somebody can't control their temper is their problem and no one elses. SE is not the place to deal with that.

SE is (or should be) for people seeking help and people who want/likes to provide it. Niceness is the right tool to make this interaction work properly.

Answer 4

I do not think that I should even enunciate the answer to your question. In any professional community, the answer may obviously only be negative. On the other extreme, if Unix.SE were a gang with established initiation rituals, I would hesitate. But my belief is that Unix.SE is a community of professionals.

I know that there are formal rules, there are moderators, but on many SE sites this number under your username, called, in a weird twist of language, “reputation” (would you call someone's income “reputation”? Looks similar) plays an oversized role. I can relate to you.

Once I edited out a personal insult out of otherwise a good and detailed answer by someone with this so called “reputation” exceeding 30,000:

If after reading that wikipedia page your question is "why would I ever use [filesystem hard links]" then you don't understand what hard links are.

This statement is not only unhelpful, as it conveys zero information (it's quite obvious that if the OP understood the answer from reading the mentioned article, they would not turn for help to the community for an answer and an insult), but also deliberately insulting, and its the only purpose (“I'm smarter than you, but I'll gracefully deign to answer your dumbhead's question”). I removed that single meaningless introductory paragraph.

The proposed edit was accepted by someone (I'm disreputable on Unix.SE, so I can only propose edits). The person who wrote the answer immediately reverted my edit. I flagged the answer as a personal attack. The flag was reset. Then I'm like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯: this says something about the person who started their answer with an insult, the moderator's attitude, and Unix.SE in general, but it is what it is, and we are who we are.

I'd say that Unix.SE is by far not the worst in this regard. The only community that I know of where this random number is not considered meaningful is Physics.SE, but there may be other positive examples. Unfortunately, these are rare. It's way too easy to equate someone's qualities, all the way from the knowledge of the subject and all the way to the level of disdain the person deserves, with a single integer number.

This is, in a sense, who we are, and how we think, or “think.” There is a reason Kahneman won a Nobel prize for the discovery of stark patterns in the human thinking (in relation to logical and monetary decisions, but the phenomenon certainly extends to many aspects of interpersonal relationships) identifying what he termed the System 1 and System 2. In my opinion, we can only accept that. Everyone's mental hygiene is in their own hands, and the only person whose one I can improve is myself. Otherwise, I'm limited to observation. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a rational person is deeply mistaken.

In a sense, the fact that we know only this “reputation” number of each other, but not skin color, income, gender, sexual orientation, religion, the home neighborhood, political sympathies and whether we graduated from Yale or a community college is a very, very positive thing. You can imagine, it could have been much worse than knowing a single and, in the grand scheme of human relationships, meaningless toy number...

Another interesting thought that just crossed my mind is that if this answer of mine will receive over 9000 up-votes, I won't be surprised. If, on the other extreme, I'll be banned from Unix.SE for life for it, it wouldn't surprise me either. When you've been on SE for a while, nothing that happens here surprises you.

Answer 5

No. I think, is disgusting in this form.

But it happens quite often on some other sites, that arguments are falsely labeled as personal attack. This is a way to attack people for their unpleasant, but true sayings. So, in general, be careful about the "personal attack", "insult", etc. labels. Unix SE is not flame-ish in this sense.

In your example, I give some chance that the actual intent of the subject was not insulting, only he has chosen an unlucky wording. The post must be even in this case, fixed (or the comment deleted).

Answer 6

If you mistake an objective statement for a subjective one then, don't take this the wrong way, you're taking it the wrong way.

If someone calls themselves out as a neophyte, implicitly or explicitly, there's no harm in saying this is far beyond your [present] capabilities.

St. Paul makes the point pretty clearly when he wrote:

I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for solid food. In fact, you are still not ready

1 Cor 3:2

Nobody said, oh, St. Paul, you're being mean, in fact, he said that for their own good.

To take another point, if someone hands me Frank Zappa's Jazz from Hell and says "play", are they helping me to be a better pianist? No, that's far beyond my capabilities.

On top of it, how do you know the person's not talking about a computer's capabilities. Do we lump our personalities with our machines? If I'm K8S on a RaspberryPi and someone says um.. "don't try putting nextcloud on that, it's far beyond your capabilities" is that person being mean?

Acknowledging that we're different and we can offer concrete answers as experts is the first step to not confusing people, which at a minimum is what effective Q&A entails. I want to know if something is beyond my capabilities. It will save time. It goes beyond niceness into something better called kindness.

I don't think the modern sense of niceness objects to the "far beyond" part so much as it objects to the word "is". If you carry out this plan to its logical extents, one would nuke every sentence written in the imperative sense as it implies how foolish one is who fails to RTFM.