Mailing list debates considered harmful
tech.blog.aknin.name
Mailing list debates considered harmful
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Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#2From the first couple paragraphs, this sounds like it's mostly a complaint about the existence of bikeshed topics. Which exist in any discussion medium.
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#3One can improve on NNTP, add verified identities etc. You can do so via GnuPG and some combination of software bits.
Usenet was built just for this, I don't understand why people don't use it widely. Forums are such POS for this kind of thing, they fragment the field make it impossible to search for a discussion in any sort of uniform way.
my 2c
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#4"no end in _site_".
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#5I got chills while reading your article, because as a single founder of a bootstrapped startup, the problem of dated mailing lists and discussion forums is the exact problem I’ve been trying to solve and this is one of the first times someone articulated the problem so well.
Check out my startup: http://BraintrustHQ.com.
If anyone is interested, I’d love to work with you and whomever else is interested to see how we can make this free and make it work for the Open Source Community.
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#6"no end in _site_".
The various grammatical errors picked my interest as well.
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#7From the first couple paragraphs, this sounds like it's mostly a complaint about the existence of bikeshed topics. Which exist in any discussion medium.
Not really. The problem isn't "people are debating trivial things instead of letting shit get done". It's "people are debating all sorts of things, and it's impossible to work out what state each of the separate debates is in".
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#8I'm curious to see how Wave fares under a python-dev-size debate, and what creative curating can accomplish.
Sometimes I think the optimal solution to online discussion is a reconfigurable 3d visualization of the graph of comment-nodes. In one configuration, node size, location, connectedness and proximity to the core of the graph would signify a comment's relative importance and "page-rank". The ability to respond to and "link" to multiple other comments would be useful here. Another would be a more standard tree-based visualization of the comments in time, but without the misleading vertical ranking of root nodes. Another visualization might be a straight serialization in time, similar to mailing lists.
I imagine the nodes to be sort of bouncy, physicsy bubbles that can be nudged around, and that the view can rotate in three dimensions and zoom in and out to focus on specific subthreads.
Other times I think that's way too heavy-weight a solution, that it would be confusing, that it might not actually solve anything, and that we do pretty well with the threaded comment trees we have now. I actually kind like that everyone sees the same thing on the page, shared experience and whatnot.
I dunno. Online discussion is hard.
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#9Does the outcome of these debates ever matter? I always think of them as a way to keep the naysayers busy while the contributers actually implement something.
Re: Mailing list debates considered harmful
#10Does the outcome of these debates ever matter? I always think of them as a way to keep the naysayers busy while the contributers actually implement something.
C'mon. I know you're being mildly facetious, but "naysayers" and contributors aren't nearly so cleanly segregated. And debate often leads to important decisions that can't just be coded away.