This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
In my view, ask culture is a fundamental value of the web. It’s really the only way something as big as the web can possibly work. Some unfortunate government interposition aside, the web connects the entire world. I can’t guess-culture my way to harmony with people that I don’t have a deep understanding of or extremely frequent contact with, but I can ask-culture with them on the web.
The three paragrahps I quoted above are the most widely cited, but there is more to the comment:
All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guess Culture person -- and you obviously are -- then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.
If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.
Obviously she's an Ask and you're a Guess. (I'm a Guess too. Let me tell you, it's great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)
Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people -- ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.
As you read through the responses to this question, you can easily see who the Guess and the Ask commenters are. It's an interesting exercise
Ibid.
One thing I love about the comment is the humility inherent in naming your own attributes without judgement. It’s the most natural thing in the world to notice behavior we don’t like, realize it’s not how we would act, and label it as wrong (and perhaps disgusting). The last paragraph of the comment notes that there are many examples of this in the original thread! But the commenter doesn’t do that — she assertively labels herself, and identifies some benefits of the opposite end of the spectrum.
As she notes, an expansive network necessitates ask culture; what is the web if not an expansive network?
This informs how I want my own creations on the web to be available. I want the public to be able to
- link to anything I’ve written
- scrape my pages
- bridge any of my feeds
- use my words or my code as a corpus
This post isn’t permission for those things, because I don’t want to be in the business of approving and denying what I make public. And because permission implies responsibility, and not only do I not want responsibility, I don’t want to have to disclaim it.