Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn’t mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn’t take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad “contributions” until they’re sick of everyone’s shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they’re dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it’s hard to tell the difference between a troll who’s trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn’t know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.
Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, “aw… putty… windows…” So I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you think I’m sad for using windows, I don’t use linux because it’s too much work” Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don’t know what I’m doing it’s not for me, and I’m like “Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?” Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to “help” me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they’d be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would’ve been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.
Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn’t mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn’t take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad “contributions” until they’re sick of everyone’s shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they’re dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it’s hard to tell the difference between a troll who’s trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn’t know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.
Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, “aw… putty… windows…” So I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you think I’m sad for using windows, I don’t use linux because it’s too much work” Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don’t know what I’m doing it’s not for me, and I’m like “Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?” Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to “help” me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they’d be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would’ve been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.