On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 03:00:17 +0000, Connor Doherty wrote: > Wow Mike, fascinating read. I'm the earliest of Millennials, so I did not > completely grow up with the web
I was born in '89 myself. :) > I guess I'm one of the few hackers that does indeed care about design. > [...] > but I think it's a bit far to call it "flashy" when I can explain to > you down to an *exact science* how well something is designed. The > free software community, as addressed in Boston this year and nearly > every year before it, has a well-documented problem with design, so I > won't go into that here. That is good---we do need people in the free software community interested in design. It's subjective, of course. I'm sure hackers far older than I would call my terminal an angry fruit salad. > You said it yourself. You don't want to use a poorly reinvented > wheel. That's exactly what most forum sites have been. And to those who only > know that world, the need for "reimagination" is obvious. Discourse is, in > my opinion, a very nice wheel, and can likely be made to do whatever you > need from your emacs setup. I'm not opposed to change. Professionally, much of my work is web development, so I'm more intimate than I'd like to be most of the time with certain things. We just need to make sure we don't sacrifice anything substantial considering the existing community. I can't say whether we will or not, and I can't say whether most on this list would care or not (I don't know the makeup of the subscribers). > Find any establishment in history and you'll see that they probably did not > "want" the wave of change that superceded them (discovery of electricity, > industrial revolution, computers) even when that change was definitely an > upgrade for the better. Depends what problem is being solved, and whether it's a solution in search of a problem. You have proposed legitimate problems, and suggested legitimate options to solve them. They're not everyone's problems, but what's important is the community as a whole, not the individual. So while I wanted to make sure my stance was understood, I wasn't dismissing any options outright, especially not having researched in any detail. > So while you may not see the need for a "re-imagination" of online > discourse, I invite you try Discourse and tell me in what ways it's not > better. Then we can potentially improve it for everyone. Again, depends who we're talking about. I have coworkers that wouldn't be able to stand mailing lists and would be very pleased by Discourse and its more modern features. They engage socially in different manners than I do. (They wouldn't have interest in this community; I'm just exposed to their opinions.) They'll communicate in gifs and emoji. They'll take screenshots of text (*twitch*) instead of pasting it. With the exception of the latter, it's fine to communicate that way. I find myself communicating differently when sending messages on my Replicant device, because I have to use the tools I have available---and it provides a completely different social experience. I've used emoji semantically on certain sites like GitLab at work, which I'd never do outside a casual social setting (but that's because, as a hacker, I don't want to couple pictorial representations with abstract concepts unnecessarily...that's a different topic). I just prefer the old, boring, but highly efficient method. (Though the argument can be rightfully made that images and emoji and such efficiently encode a great deal of information, especially culturally, that's not representable in text, with the exception of unicode.) I also lose some of that by rejecting HTML e-mail. If I _did_ want to communicate in that manner, it wouldn't make much sense to use my tools, unless Emacs' ability to display images would suffice (I can't say; I use a VTE primarily). But this also demonstrates the divide that I was referring to: Discourse is a whole different means of communication. There is overlap, but it's a step above---it allows more expressiveness, for better or for worse. So those of us who do decide to stick with a mailing list approach might completely lose context of certain discussions. It creates subgroups / subcultures within a community. Does that matter? Will that happen? I can't say. I don't want my messages to be interpreted as fighting for one way or the other, though---I don't do much on these lists or on the Wiki (for lack of time, not interest). I'm just adding input to the conversation. :) -- Mike Gerwitz Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B 2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05 https://mikegerwitz.com
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss