It's funny you mention /r/golang, because to be honest I'm not a huge fan of people using it to ask beginner questions. There was a discussion about that a few months ago, and see my comments there: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/g9zyva/real_questio...

In short, I think the biggest problem we have is that every community space tends to gravitate to "help me out getting started"-space, and I feel this puts quite a bit of pressure on the community as a whole; see the thread I linked as well as the blog posted I linked in there for some more details on my perspective.

I've probably helped out more people over the years than most programmers on various platforms; I'm hardly some n00b-hating curmudgeon. I just think it would be better for everyone if there's a clearer delineation of community spaces, because sometimes I just don't want to, and that's entirely valid too. There's someone asking for "best web frameworks?", "best way to learn Go", etc. on /r/golang all the time. I find it's just tiresome (and also lazy to be honest, as it's been discussed a million times already). Your specific question seems a bit more advanced/useful, but people get burned out by the torrent of beginner questions and then all questions are treated alike.

Stack Overflow, specifically the Go tag on Stack Overflow, is toxic and shit. It's so toxic that I just stopped participating. I'm mostly interested in answering questions, but it's just too frustrating to see how people are treated. I'm quite sad about this as I think it has a lot of potential, but any effort to change this have been met with hostility. I've ranted about this on my website[1] as well as on Twitter recently[2]. Much of the toxicity is coming from a small group of users by the way, so it's not even that of a problem to solve IMO. There are also some really cool people on the Go tag in SO (icza, specifically, is fantastic: always helpful and detailed, never condensing or an asshole; a model SO user in many ways).

On the Vi & Vim Stack Exchange we had one user being an asshole in my 5 years as a moderator, so I banned him for a week (only ban we ever had in that period) which led to a "please delete all my posts" temper tantrum (which we didn't of course) and he hasn't been back since. Goodbye and good riddance: the site has been much better since. While he provided many useful posts, he also chased away an equal amount of people, and new people came in and provided equally helpful posts after he left. It's really not a very hard problem to solve... The Go tag can be fixed by just correcting (warnings, or bans if that doesn't work) about 3 people.

Anyway, about suckless specifically: it's a community explicitly intended for a certain type of advanced users. I don't think there's any real objections to any and all questions, but if you come in and start asking questions right off the bat then that's probably not really appreciated as such.

> there were a lot of blind spots where I wished I could have asked a mentor with extreme domain-specific knowledge to help me understand something fundamental/fill in the gaps that I was missing at the time.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think many people don't really mind directing people in the right direction as such, but the big issues is that the industry has been growing at this incredible rate for decades now, meaning there are always more beginners to mentor. It's a never-ending torrent of people flooding in, and it gets tiresome. In many ways it's a scaling problem, which is exactly why I think we should be clearer about which community/community spaces are for what, exactly.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

[2]: https://twitter.com/arp242_martin/status/1334759690140434432 and https://twitter.com/arp242_martin/status/1330777673266708482