The ubuntu community is one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever been a part of, it has a much more diverse set of people and ideas than other development communities, but retains a strict sense of community and togetherness.
I think this has a lot to do with the ideals behind the community, it doesn’t feel disingenuous like some commercially engineered communities. I think is a reflection of the separation between Ubuntu development and commercial interests (Canonical) on the developers side.
You never get Canonical Support services trying to interfere with the Ubuntu Forums and their no replies team. For a start it’d be a waste of time, they serve very different markets and needs.
But sometimes you do get troubles where interactions between members isn’t ideal. In societies, it sometimes doesn’t matter if your right or wrong, it matters how your positioned in the community. If your seen as imposing, distant and dismissive then your only going to ruffle feathers.
The case of the notorious notifications is not a failure of reason or logic, but a failure to see things from a community perspective. That a community is really made from real live human beings, that most of the time are emotional, reactionary and sub-consciously thinking animals. What is most interesting is that the logic of humans changes from individual rationality to a more misunderstood group rationality.
I know as programmers and developers we link to think of ourselves as rational, post-modernist enlightened beings. But that kind of flight from what we really are, I think, does nothing but disadvantage community communications and cohesion.
I think you can engineer community space, but not the people that fill it. Likewise I don’t think anyone can expect individual rationales to relate to group rationales and complain that people are being irrational when they don’t fit the prescribed pattern.