By David Gewirtz
We recently got a long letter from one of our readers, Jimmy Pena, complaining about the "condescending undercurrent" expressed in some of our reader answers. This is a difficult topic to discuss, because almost all online publishers experience some level of excited and supportive readers and some who are abusive trolls.
I'm going to first let you read Jimmy's letter to us, and then I'll add a few of my own comments. The next section is all in Jimmy's words.
Jimmy Pena's letter to us
I found OutlookPower magazine a few months ago and have enjoyed the articles. I do have one suggestion. Consider how these comments appear to a new reader:
In Running rules when Outlook is closed you write:
First, I probably should clarify to Sergio that we're not really offering a service. We get hundreds of letters a week and we typically only choose one to answer. If you are having a serious Outlook problem, you should turn to the topics and troubleshooting sections of OutlookPower or call Microsoft support.
and
We've had people call and cry and whine because we wouldn't solve their technical issues in seconds.
In The usual PST sharing question and coloring folders Joe Dolittle writes:
This week, we have two questions from readers and don't answer either to their satisfaction.
and
OK, here we go again.
And so on.
The "we receive a lot of questions and can only answer one a week" disclaimer has appeared in several of your articles.
I think we get it.
You may not realize this, but your online magazine is not the only one that receives questions. Furthermore, complaining about your site's popularity while simultaneously using submitted questions as content could be interpreted as dishonest.
These kinds of statements appear in your articles often enough for a casual reader like me to notice them. A more cynical reader might conclude that your authors get a charge out of encouraging this condescending undercurrent towards end users.
On most sites, visitors just lurk and very few of them (probably less than 1%) actually write in or comment. You might consider publicly thanking your readers for thinking enough of you to actually send in a question and providing you with something to write about. If you've already done so, I'd be grateful for a link.
You could create an online forum and direct all those "hundreds" of emails to ask their questions there, perhaps someone else could help them, since you're too busy to answer more than one a week.
This is just one readers' opinion, but I thought you'd like to know that the tone of some of your articles hasn't gone unnoticed.
Thanks for your time,
Jimmy
David responds
Well, Jimmy does have one point I agree with. It's been far too long since we've explicitly thanked readers for reading the magazine and sending us in letters. So thanks to all of you.
The second thing I agree with is his suggestion for setting up a forum, because "you're too busy to answer more than one a week." Yes, we are that busy. We're already working seven days a week. But, back to the forums. When we first launched ZATZ, we had PowerBoards that served this purpose. Somewhere along the way in the last 10 years, the software we used didn't survive an upgrade transition and we lost that capability.
We're actually now migrating our entire content management system to a new environment and hope to allow reader discussion once again. It's a big project that's sometime off, but we do intend to do so. We'd love to see readers helping readers.
But I do want to talk a bit about reader attitudes towards questions and why, sometimes, we seem a little exasperated. While many of our readers are cool, polite, friendly, and a joy to talk to, there's a subset of our readers who are downright nasty.
- We've had readers who've screamed at us over the phone because we weren't willing to provide free tech support.
- We've had readers insult us and send email with profanities because we didn't pick their question to answer.
- We've had readers send incredibly abusive emails when we answered their questions, but told them Outlook couldn't do what they want.
- And we've had readers whose questions we answered in detail insult our family members by name because it took us a few days to publish an answer to their question and they wanted an answer within minutes.
We have an entire section of the magazine dedicated to troubleshooting Outlook. One of my favorite experiences was when a reader sent me an email telling me he had PST problems, I sent him a link to our troubleshooting section, and five minutes later I got a phone call where the guy was screaming -- yelling at the top of his lungs -- that it was my job to find the right article and fix his computer. This, by the way, is why many Web site owners don't publish their phone numbers. We do, even when we know any call might be like this.
I've personally received death threats a number of times, along with suggestions that I should kill myself. I also personally received death threats when we posted links about where people could register to vote -- and where we even gave away free solutions guides (giving up a full month's revenue) for readers who did register to vote.
It's important to say that this behavior comes from a small percentage of readers, but it's not fun. I've talked to many other members of the technical press and they report the same thing on their sites and publications.
We work very hard at this job for not nearly enough money, take absolutely no money from either the readers we're helping or Microsoft, and yet, for some reason, many people out their feel they have the right to get technical support from us and the right to be abusive if they don't get what they want, when they want it.
Much of this stems from the mistaken idea that because we write about Outlook, we must be able to provide free technical support. We're writers. Providing technical support is an operation that's completely beyond our ability to provide. I think it's the same sort of cognitive disconnect that lets some people insult and throw things at actors. Many people seem to project the behavior of a character an actor portrays onto the actor himself and because they dislike the character, they think it's okay to be abusive to the actor.
So yes, sometimes we do sound cranky. It comes with the territory. We'll do our best to keep an eye on that and try to keep it out of our writing as much as possible, but we are human and we do have off days.
Let's all just remember to try to be polite. Jimmy's letter was polite, and I do appreciate that.
