I got to thinking recently: Why are interactions with some small number of community members always unpleasant?
It seems to me as a general rule that the people who are unpleasant to deal with (or at least all of those I can think of in any of the communities I am involved with) all have the same basic fundamental viewpoint: Assume malice by default.
By this I mean that when they see something and post/tweet/mention it, they approach it from the idea that the community or parts of it are deliberately conspiring, hiding, planning, or doing the thing with “mallice aforethought”, and that the community or parts of it must PROVE that they are not doing so. There also seems a subset that assume some kind of malicious ignorance (“You should google this, since you didn’t you are stupid and wasting my time”).
In contrast the vast majority of people in communities I am involved in either assume nothing (“hey, whats up with this, can you tell me?”) or assume good faith (“This looks like a bug, but perhaps I don’t understand what you are trying to do here, can you explain?”) and are generally quite pleasant to deal with.
I’m sure there are counter examples, but I wonder if in general people agree?