Anyone who’s spent a good amount of time in a help channel on a Minecraft animation server can related to this; you go on help and support, and see the following:

• One person asking how to import Optifine shaders
• That guy using 2.79 who gets offended when you politely suggest updating to a new version
• The person who wants to import animation from a youtube video (I swear I’m not making this up)
• 50 people asking why material mode is so slow
• 10 more people asking how to show textures
• 1 or 2 people asking how to move bones (seriously guys?)
• The poor soul who’s dedicated to helping these people (F in the chat for them)
• The “cool” 12 year old saying bruh every sentence

Basically, people treating help and support as Google. How did we get here?

Important Clarification

Don’t take this as me hating the concept of help channels. I think they’re a good idea, when used correctly. My problem is that we’re teaching people to use help channels for issue that can easily be fixed with some digging on Google (or issues that are covered in basic tutorials). In addition, we’re also teaching these people not to accept help if it doesn’t relate to Minecraft animation or even Blender as a whole, which can not be overlooked.

Person ≠ Google

It shouldn’t be understated how powerful Google is. Unlike humans, Google is always there, and it can understand the most non-sensical thing. Humans can not, but we’re teaching people to treat humans as such.

I’ve seen so many cases of people getting annoyed when waiting for someone to help them with their issue (an issue that 3/4ths of the time can easily be resolved with Google), or people throwing fits in channels when a person doesn’t (understandably) understand the problem when given something like “why is x happening?” (remember, half of 3D software is seeing).

And yet, how many times have I seen someone say “next time, start with Google” or something along those lines? Not even in double digits.

It’s understandable; in an age where people get offended over really small things, we don’t want to offend others. However, at what point does not wanting to offend others cross a line?

When a person is unable to first solve an issue on their own.

Let’s Stop Feeding Bad Habits

“Wow Standing, that’s mean”

It has to be said, we need to stop feeding the behavior that causes people to not use their most powerful tools: their brain box and Google.

“How?”

A method so magical, very few people know it, and those that do are afraid to show it.

Link the solution to the issue at hand from Google and tell them to read it

or better yet

Search the issue on google and link the results page (you know, the page with all the links)

Seriously, is it that hard? Are we so concerned with offending other people that we can’t even tell them to use Google and go from there, and to use help channels if Google is of no use?

Yes, apparently we are; I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but we’ve created this mess, and it is our job to clean up this mess.