An observation: I notice that by virtue of people being mostly anonymous, a curious effect occurs on programming discords (and by extension elsewhere):
People who are "chat savvy" (or whatever we should call being good at writing in a way that is similar to being good at social interactions in real life) are able to dominate discussions by virtue of this.
In addition, people tend to "cluster" when it comes to opinions, so that followers of such persons may sway others ("everyone else agrees on this").
However, such savvy has nothing to do with actual programming skill or knowledge. Many of these "leaders" are in fact fairly inexperienced, if not outright beginners. Age is similarly obfuscated, so that teenagers might be seen as old and middle-aged persons may be taken for teenagers.
The most obvious example when someone new comes to a Discord and enthusiastically starts presenting ideas. If these ideas are not "approved" by the leaders, the person might immediately be mocked and treated as a beginner / idiot.
I've seen this played out several times, at one occasion a 60+ year old gentleman presenting a language and compiler, where he solved several long standing practical problems he'd encountered over the course of his career. He was laughed at and ridiculed as knowing nothing about programming or real world problems by kids 1/3rd his age because he wasn't presenting it in the way that was "expected" in that community. It was painful to see.
Outside of direct bullying, criticizing well-known people in the business is a favorite past-time. You often find people confidently deriding others as "not having any experience", "not knowing what they're talking about", "is just making things up etc". These critics are very sure of themselves, with aforementioned followers to echo those feelings. So you end up with a bunch of 16-year olds deriding 50+ year old programmers with multiple hit games under their belt as "not knowing anything about programming" and collecting pats on the back by the crowd for saying something so profound!
So what is my point? Nothing really except for these observations and to conclude that there is no wisdom of the crowds online, you need to find truth on your own.
