I tried to follow the course using the backcountry map, but due to some Slack in the GPS, I ended up Discoursed. I fell, badly twisting my ankle, and was not able to Github and walk. Thus stranded in the middle of nowhere, I peered into my backpack. I only one Carrot left to eat, and to my utter dismay, I had left the Flarum gun at the Basecamp. Luckily, my cellphone's data connection somehow worked well enough that my E-mail client was able to clear the SOS message of the outbox after some 23 retries.
If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
321–329 of 329 posts
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#322I can't agree with this essay more. In the early days of the Ethereum community a lot of open coordination was done on reddit and a threaded forum hosted on Vanilla Forums. Initially for privacy and convenience, Skype, gitter, Discord, and Telegram began to take hold, and later became the primary place for open, public discussions and some decision-making as well. Threaded forums were still used but not central. It w…
I should also add two more important pieces to this:
1. In-person meetings and real-time calls have been a major part of the work. There is an agenda and very good notes are taken during these sessions (https://github.com/ethereum/pm). The calls have been essential for coordinating in a more formal setting and to get a feel for when consensus is achieved on a particular topic or proposal.
What threaded forums later added was the ability for others to get involved in the discussion, particularly those who are not core developers or not able to attend.
2. Another important medium has been GitHub issues (e.g. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315). Proposals are submitted as a PR and, earlier in the evolution of the governance process, many people would comment on them. These were not ideal due the flat nature of the format.
What generally changed on GitHub issues in recent years was the encouraging of commenters to go to an external forum thread (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315#issuecomment-63...), leaving editors and authors to work out structural and other basic issues about a proposal in GitHub PR comments.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#323At Automattic we have not been using email for the past dozen years for internal communications. We replace email with WordPress.com/P2 plus IRC (moved on to Slack).
In our internal P2s we count 1 million posts (that might have been emails), 2.6 million comments (that might have been email replies) across 1,100 P2s (that might have been email silos).
We are active on Slack, but decisions are made on asynch P2s which are the source of truth.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#324> Rule of thumb: If a discussion will matter after today, don’t have it in a chat room. Check out Discourse, Twist, Carrot, Threads, Basecamp, Flarum, or heck even GitHub issues. I see; anything but e-mail! Gotcha.
Didn't notice the article author encourages people to e-mail him, right from the blog page. :)
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#325Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#326Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you. Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late. I like the idea of a time-limited channel. You can only reply to it during the meeting, and up to 15 minutes after. Theoretically it would force everyone to com…
The one Discord server I participate in has channels that only allow one message every 15 minutes or so. I think the userbase is roughly divided in two groups: people who are online all the time and people (like me) who check in a few times a day. It's easier to participate in the slowed-down channels.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is completely tangential to the content of the post
There's no such thing as "completely tangential". Something is either tangential, or it's not. Perhaps you should read a dictionary before your next attempt at "forum police".
Being a jerk like this, or outright attacking someone like you did in your last comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697980), is not cool and will get you banned on HN. You (i.e. all of us) need to follow the rules regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful. We're trying for something other than internet default here.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wave seemed to me to be an unimaginative copy of other threaded comment implementations. The indentations seemed to waste valuable space on each page. Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure. If I hadn’t known it was Google, I would’ve thought it to be a bad college project.
> Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure. Insecure in what manner? To me it's no more insecure than a VCS - sure, anyone could edit anyone else's code, but version history was always there.
There’s a difference between interjecting “What he was trying to say is...” and changing the words he used; those weren’t his words.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I mean I get that there are various different chat or chat/email hybrid solutions nowadays that are competing with each other. Personally though I have nothing to complain about with slack. It has threading. It only has one level threading but that might actually be a good thing because we slack with non tech people too. One thread is sometimes hard for them to grasp. Make that a regular threading model and the…
> It only has one level threading but that might actually be a good thing because we slack with non tech people too. One thread is sometimes hard for them to grasp. Make that a regular threading model and they will utterly get lost Off topic, but this astounds me. Not trying to be elitist (I'm genuinely curious), but what is it about threads that throws them off? They seem unrelated to software. I would have thought…
Just because they're unrelated to software does not mean that everyone will understand. I can't really tell you what makes them hard for people, I can only guess.
One guess is that there's the mental effort in keeping track of these threads (even when they're literally right in front of you in the interface.
Maybe it's the fact that they're just so used to the whole email chain with 15 levels of quoting old emails that is so common in many companies. Many many people are mentally immobile and unprepared to switch to anything else, once they're used to something. Lifelong learning is not something that is common in every job, like it is in software development.
Again you can't really ask me because I find threading totally awesome.