Well, let's apply it a little more specifically to "Don't fly your drone over a crowd of people."
Are you saying this is a "common sense" thing? because it isn't. If you look at sum total of the community - the marketing, the home made videos, the commercial uses, etc...it would tell you it's perfectly fine to fly over crowds because people are doing it, and there are videos on youtube, and the commercials selling you the drones show you crowd footage, and it's become part of the general zeitgeist.
Why not?
If the battery goes south, you've got a falling object with the capability to slice people up. Take a look at YouTube for examples of weddings and festivals where drones have fallen on the crowds and people have been injured. Common sense would say, "Don't do that," and the instructions for just about every drone I've seen say, "Don't fly over people,"
You are kind of right in this - there is "common sense" that applies but I don't think you have the right one. The common sense that applies here is that if you are going to fly over crowds, you should take precautions to minimize your risk to others. charge and test your batteries, practice flying, talk to others in your community about safe practices, etc.
but people don't read instructions or warnings because they either don't feel it applies to them, they're smarter than the instructions, or they don't want someone to tell them what to do.
And here is where you make the unfounded assumption and are just crapping on people. Maybe people don't read the instructions or maybe they do - is it unreasonable that they would think flying over a crowd is not something they should do? Well the countless youtube videos, commercial work (like TV shows shot with a drone), heck even the box the copter came in say otherwise with their images. There is a conflicting message - the instructions say no, but the community says "Go for it, look how awesome it is, you'll be a photo hero, it might even get you laid", and there isn't really anything right now to advocate safe practices in between the instructions and the community.
this is where we come in as veterans. We talk to people, we publish self standards publicly about safe operation, we develop preflight plans and socialize them, and we encourage the purchase of insurance. We are the community and it's up to us to be the tip of the spear on safety - if we see someone doing something unsafe, we don't attack them with hostility and tell them they can't do something, we approach them with compassion and try to assist them. We self edit our own videos on youtube to eliminate unsafe behavior, and if we do something complex we publish what precautions we took so others who do what we want to do can follow our lead or even improve upon our safety measures. We lead the conversation and practices by example.
That's why we have these issues currently of people doing what they're doing with drones.
No that's why you think it is, and I think you are wrong and are being unforgiving to new entrants to the hobby. You can call people names and make grand general statements that crap on nameless, faceless people or you can take a more compassionate approach that they just don't have the experience yet and as members of the community they could use some guidance. Think about the guidance you got when you first joined the hobby, and how different it would be if people had the same attitude toward you that you are now saying about a general population of people. I don't think you would have stayed with it.
If you want to say that we shouldn't expect people to have common sense, then the other side of that is that someone is not stepping in to educate them, be it you, me, the government, whoever - and we get back to the issues of people feeling that the instructions don't apply, that they can't understand them, or that it encroaches on their liberties.
That is not what I am saying at all. What I am saying that there is a learning curve and just generally crapping on people for being at the bottom of that curve is counter productive. They should have "common sense" but common sense related to an activity comes from experience and that takes time and community. If you have it and you see someone without it you should share it openly so they have it too. If you want to just say people are stupid and lazy that's why we are here - well then how is that helping? People aren't stupid, they just don't know any better because they haven't done this before.
you can sit back and complain about the problem or how more people are ruining the hobby, or you can be active and an engine for positivity and change. The choice is yours.
I would say that a lot of it just seems like common sense, except that the majority of people DON'T have common sense anymore - don't text and drive, if there's no power to your home you aren't going to be able to watch TV, and just because one person says something is true doesn't mean it IS true. But I digress...the grumpy "get offa my lawn!" man is starting to come out in me.
