I'm not saying it's just tech forums, but tech forums tend to be worse, at least the ones I've experienced. For example food forums or clothes forums or film forums tend to be a bit more friendly and open-minded towards people who have different tastes. There isn't as much tribalism about what you eat or wear or watch.

I've actually stopped spending time on tech forums because non-tech ones are so much nicer to hang around on.

And like I said, retro tech forums are also tend to be friendlier than current tech forums, possibly because there's no point being competitive about products that were discontinued years ago.

I can only assume you haven't tried sci-fi forums. The Trek/Wars wars are internet lore. Indeed, I have seen people go into complete meltdown because someone dared tp suggest that a favourite character was in love with character X when s/he obviously had wonderful chemistry with character Y!

And that's before you go near fora that allow discussion of politics and religion.

I find this place relatively calm and pleasant. There's a fair bit of defensiveness about Other devices and other websites, but as far as I can see that's just the sort of jingoism one might expect over something people feel passionately about. Compared with, say, sci-fi, people here are actually investing a great deal into the devices and software: a little fierce loyalty is to be expected. And some of it is meant to be humorous.

I'm sorry you find it competitive. Please hang around more and change it!

There's a lot of misunderstandings, mistakes and flat out ignorance when it comes to people saying "facts" about their favourite tech, or the tech they are criticising.

So a lot of posts are people angrily arguing against something which was either factually wrong, or they think it was wrong (and then someone else jumps on them...).

After all, tech is expensive. Most people can't buy one of each thing. So incorrect information must be countered!

Whereas you can't really be mistaken about your own taste in clothes and food, and pretty much everyone accepts that there's no point telling someone they're mistaken about their taste :-)

I.e. what I'm hypothesising is that tech forums might be more about "the facts" (so we'd like to think) and less about "my personal preferences" which I might expect in a clothing ideas forum.

The problem with any forum is that you are going to notice the loud people more than the calm ones.Tech, especially developers, are as passionate about their views as any other creative group. Most put a lot of themselves into their work and try desperately to make it the very best they think it can be. You should hear the cat fights I have to referree, LOL.

Open source communities tend to be made up of people with a passion (they aren't in it for the money) so this makes things a little worse too.

Trick is to avoid the cat fights and hit ignore on people that repeatidly annoy you. I agree this shouldn't be neccessary but differing views and the passion to fight for them are generally what drives the tech innovation on.

Men+Technology+Money+A place where nobody gets the last word=The crazy world of internet forums

Have you not heard about Mum's Online? Think the women measure up to the Men on this at least as equals!

RevdKathy came the closest when she mentioned religion forums. Too many people seem to have elevated certain aspects of tech to their own religion. For those not subscribing to the dogma, it's like an atheist dropping into a christian forum. There may be some rational discussion but it will be interspersed with less than rational diatribes and condemnation.

Here the prevailing dogma is that of open source, Maemo, and the N900. An iPhone forum would just as religiously defend closed source, iPhone OS, and the 3GS iPhone. Here the second coming is Maemo 6, there it is the Apple Tablet.

My advice is to take everything with a grain of salt and to sit back and laugh at the most rabid.

Well... technology is ultimately a matter of taste too though. In theory these are useful tools but most of the time high end devices are bought as entertaining toys.

Probably doesn't help that there's a heightened annoyance factor going on with Maemo5 and the N900 right now, since it's pretty much been a botched launch for both. It's a lot of money to spend on a piece of hardware and software to have the manufacturer give you the runaround on it. I think things will cool down quite a bit once we can get the device and the operating system in our hands and begin to use it, develop for it, and show it to others.