On Sunday, April 12, 2020 8:55:48 AM PDT Nate Bargmann wrote: > I've been hearing/reading this old saw about "less technical users" for > well over two decades, and not just in Linux land but amateur radio as > well, and it really touches a nerve of mine. How are less technical > users ever going to progress into more technical users unless they have > the opportunity to break something and thus learn? Striving to make > *everything* at beginner level 0.1 just retards growth. That said, I do > use Gnome. ;-)
This touches my nerve too and I can't agree more. Both justifications for Discourse are wrong at their core: 1. The "lets attract more users with this new convenient tool" premise thin is like this. Imagine you are the owner of the Healthy Food Restaurant. And for some reason people don't visit your place very often, instead they go to fast food chain where they get fast, unhealthy coated with sugar food. And you think "So average person is impatient, addicted to sugar and is overweight, I need to put more sugar into my food, compromise on quality to increase speed of delivery to attract more sugar-addicted visitors!" It is only a good decision if you only care about making money. 2. The "it is easier to moderate" premise is IMHO is an attack on computing freedom and freedom of speech. Email is decentralized and replacing it with a centralized communication tool puts to much trust into the person/group who moderates it. Moderation + centralization is a slippery slope to dictatorship. Too much power in one's hands. I wouldn't trust myself to make the right call every time I need to "moderate" someone. And the whole idea of "moderation" is evil in its core. People are different, they have different thoughts, different opinions and often they are bad at communication. And learning how to communicate properly together as a community is freaking hard. And all that scares the shit out of some folks so they decide to "moderate" and use "centralized platform" so they can hide from real problems that we can't talk to each other. Do you really want more users that bad that you are willing to compromise on your own principles of freedom and technical excellence? > > As far as I can tell for Debian the main drivers are: > > > > 1. The hope that software like Discourse can improve the quality of > > discussion as well as signal-to-noise ration, e.g. by providing an > > alternative to "+1" messages. > > As the message archive is centrally managed, moderators can remove > messages behind the scenes, for good or for ill. On a mailing list we > all get the good with the bad. It's up to us which is which. Yeah it's > messy and doesn't provide much of a safe space. Viva la liberty! > > > 2. Providing communication options that are preferred by the younger > > generation, and that's just the natural course of life. > > More than likely this is driven by mobile device users where typing is a > pain at best and typing long missives is better left for when one is at > a real computer. > > As I use neomutt as an MUA and make heavy use of procmail filtering, > trying to access my mail via my phone simply isn't feasible. Unlike > most I do not have a Gmail account to access from my phone, etc. > > - Nate -- Ihor Antonov https://useplaintext.email
