Jesus Christ. Whenever I try to do ANYTHING for you guys, I do something wrong.
Is there any way I could contribute to PD.com without being seen as a troll or an idiot?
I'm being totally serious.
(P. S. That discussion about me was actually hilarious. I laughed.)
My best suggestion is:
1. Stop trying to "help". There's this thing that happens when you have the mindset that you are here to "be helpful", which is that you end up giving people uninformed, unhelpful unsolicited advice, which in general people will perceive either as you being condescending or as you being a dumbass. You see that shit all over Facebook, and nobody likes it there either.
2. Read the thread before commenting. That can really help head off accidental dumbassery. We all violate this regularly, but that's largely because we
3. Know your audience. I don't mean memorize our work schedules and birthdays, that's creepy. But I do mean that there aren't that many people here and we are all very different individuals with different areas of expertise. For example, Johnny is a psychology graduate student and I'm a bio/psych double major undergrad. The odds that neither of us would have heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect are vanishingly small. Now, I'm not saying that you should be able to recall everyone's field of study off the top of your head, but hopefully it should at least ring a bell, so that you don't find yourself helpfully informing Cain about terrorism facts.
4. Be humble. Yeah, I know that we don't generally seem very humble (THIS THREAD NOTWITHSTANDING) but the reality is that you're on a forum where anything you know, it is highly likely that at least one other person knows. For the most part, except when things break down into inchoate screeching at each other over trivial slights real and imagined, we are able to get along with each other fairly well by following the general rules of politeness, including trying not to assume that the people you are talking to don't already know all about what it is you're planning to tell them. Sometimes they won't, and you get a chance to share something new. Sometimes they will know more than you do, in which case you might get a chance to learn something new.
5. Use all of the above to help you think your post through, both as you're writing and on your final read-through before hitting "post".
