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GitHub Discussions Beta

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101–110 of 141 posts

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#101
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sponsors is about to hit Patreon At least for Patreon, they have a large enough user base, this won't hit them particularly hard.

I’d imagine open source is just a small slice of the pie compared to the youtube/twitch/gaming audiences. And I imagine any project earning thousands on Patreon isn’t going to attempt to migrate all of that just to keep it in github.

It will probably only affect Patreon’s share of FOSS-projects starting today (and thus doesn't already have a Patreon).

Of course if enough people start using GitHub Sponsors, end-users may make it a expectation/demand to be able to sponsor their favourite projects there if they are going to bother (much like users today won’t bother to sign up for a Patreon-competitor).

And then it might start having a noticeable effect.

That said, anecdotally speaking, today only one of my Patreon pledges are for software projects, and most are for youtubers.

If that holds up for other people too, I suspect Patreon will be fine.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#102
post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

>it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way.

I don't like having my revenue generating activities linked to a social network for programmers. It seems like a terrible mix. I am not social at all. I know programming has now become a "social" thing as it is in the mainstream, but I prefer the days of it being an obscure world where you had to join some kind of mailing list.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this kind of deep-threading, or tree-nesting, encourages a forked conversation, with everyone in the discussion trying to respond to individual comments in an ever-growing tree, rather than responding to the current conversation as a whole? I find mailing list threads that are trees very hard to follow. It's probably a conscious decision.

I've found trees encourage forked conversations in a good way. While I don't find them hard to follow, I do find revisiting them to be a bit difficult. While it can seem difficult to follow the overarching topic given a set of trees, it's near impossible to have any in-depth discussions about more than one thing in flat threads. I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the succes…

What do you think about Zulip's format?

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#104
post #32
post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers. SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer. That isn't to say di…

It also competes with Reddit.

I am a long time user of SE (questions and answers alike) and I go to reddit for questions which are more vague (because I do not know where to go) or the ones which invite discussions.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#105

This links to Zeit, which seems like a kind of advert for their product? How do we actually find out about GitHub Discussions and opting-into it? Or did GitHub only enrol one company into the beta?

That's like saying a link to react on github is an advert for Facebook

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#106
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

That's not what the close button does and it typically requires a few confirmations from other users, so you can't close things randomly yourself. Almost all close votes are reasonable - have a look at the "close vote" moderation queue. It may seem beginner hostile sometimes, but in practice it's mostly: you can't have a personal approach to everyone when looking through hundreds of messages.

I'm at 60k reputation so I have a decent idea of how it works. My point is that you probably should have a personal approach before voting 'close'.

If you don't, there's no real harm in leaving bad questions open until there is someone else in the community willing to help out.

I find myself looking at closed questions wanting to help but unable to too many times.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#107
post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

> One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. Uhm... have you ever heard of a little-known site called "Hackernews"?

I wasn't particularly clear, apologies. I was really referring to instances where navigating the tree view was a core part of the interface.

This means being able to expand and collapse the tree easily, as well as identify quickly nodes that have replies.

On a typical Usenet reader, new replies are normally highlighted, and read nodes/subthreads can be quickly collapsed, often by default.

Neither of those are possible with HN, Reddit or typical NodeBB sites where every post is displayed whether read or not.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#108
post #35
post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

SO is one of the few places on the internet that give me a positive experience pretty much every time I go there.

Type in my programming question, go to the page, scroll down and see a wide variety of idiomatic, well-researched and thoroughly critiqued solutions, very readable, ready to copy, and with the concepts spelled out to study up on.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found trees encourage forked conversations in a good way. While I don't find them hard to follow, I do find revisiting them to be a bit difficult. While it can seem difficult to follow the overarching topic given a set of trees, it's near impossible to have any in-depth discussions about more than one thing in flat threads. I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the succes…

Here's a concrete example where I think it goes wrong. You say something, and two people respond. There's one thing to say in response to both people - maybe they both misunderstood part of your point. Which comment do you respond to? On places like HN people seem to feel the need to respond to both branches, which causes exponential growth if it continues, compared to if you could respond to the two comments as one.…

> Maybe we need a comment DAG instead?

HN comments are a DAG. DAGs are branchy, which is the problem. It seems like you want to merge or rebase the two comments and then reply with a new node pointing to the last of them.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#110
post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

Do you think this kind of deep-threading, or tree-nesting, encourages a forked conversation, with everyone in the discussion trying to respond to individual comments in an ever-growing tree, rather than responding to the current conversation as a whole? I find mailing list threads that are trees very hard to follow. It's probably a conscious decision.

Most conversations get forked anyway IME. An easily navigable tree view supports that much better imo.
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