Piero Faustini wrote: > > How many people use mailing lists? How many use forums? Say 1 lister every 20 > forumers? Say 1 to 10 (and I'm fair)?
Fairness doesn't enter into it. Either you have data, or you don't. > It's not me who says lists are > difficoult, it's people. I never used lists before knowing LyX. Perhaps it is possible that generalizing from your own experience is not a productive research methodology in this case. In addition to lyx-users, I subscribe to 9 email lists that I read regularly. In the past, I've subscribed to at least as many others, which I dropped only because their subject areas were no longer as relevant to me. I don't participate regularly in any web forums. Email lists have been in widespread use for decades. They've endured in the face of competitive technologies (Usenet, various web-based systems, instant messaging) because for some purposes, a significant number of users find them superior. Everyone on lyx-users could use a web forum. That we choose not to disproves your claim. In this instance, people have chosen to use the list. > It's 10 years since last time I disabled cookies. Hurrah for you. Other people may make different choices. > Children use forums. Children who use LyX are welcome to discuss it in forums. So, for that matter, are adults. Some of us don't want to. > Lists are difficoult to use comparing to their advantages, so they are > for PRO users, almost always have been, and in future I guess they will be > ONLY > for pro. Utter nonsense. Look at the history of BITNET lists, for example. There is a regrettable tendency, in discussing computer culture, to offer spurious claims about the history of computing as support for arguing that technology X is superior, "intuitive", "usable", etc. This happens frequently in academia (I've seen a number of scholars make these arguments just in the past year), and even more often in casual argumentation. These arguments are unpersuasive for at least two reasons. First, their historical claims, as I noted, are generally not supported by any data; and they're often contradicted by the data that is available. Second, they endorse the most naive sort of teleological narrative. Even if more users chose technology X in the past, that hardly implies that technology X is better, or that moving to technology X would attract more users, or that any other benefit automatically attaches to technology X. Indeed, this is the entire proposition of LyX: that it's better, at least for some purposes, than Microsoft Word. More people use Word. Children use Word. That doesn't prove Word is better; it doesn't prove Word is easier; it doesn't prove that more people would switch to LyX if it were more like Word. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
