On Sun, 20 Feb 2022 at 18:05, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > On Sat, Feb 19, 2022 at 06:04:28AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > > > Popularity is a *terrible* way to judge ideas. I'm currently fighting > > with another platform on that same topic. > > Can we ask which platform?
Not on-list, out of courtesy. It's unrelated. > > All you can see from a system like that is how many of the popular > > ideas get implemented. It says nothing about how many good ideas end > > up languishing with a small number of votes, simply because they never > > reach critical mass and not enough people see them. > > Rather like the way we tell people to publish on PyPI and see if it > becomes popular. Yes and no. Python doesn't use PyPI download counts to decide what gets added to the standard library, for instance. A package is not judged solely on the basis of some form of upvote. We tell people to publish and see, but even if it isn't popular, it's still on PyPI and has whatever value it has. > > Does GetSatisfaction allow downvotes? If yes: how do you stop a vocal > > few from shooting down any idea they don't like? > > Nothing like Python-Ideas then :-) > > Typically voting systems only allow logged-in users to vote, and you can > only vote once. You can change your vote at any time, but a vocal few is > limited to only downvoting once each, they can't vote a thousand times > each and overwhelm the popular voice. > > Same applies to up-voting. Question: Do votes from newly-created accounts have as much weight as those from well-established accounts? I can assure you, from experience, that there is no correct answer to this question, and that the vocal few can always shoot down ideas they don't like, if downvoting is a possibility. > > There is no way to make a popular vote fair. > > That's an odd take. "Fair" is such an ill-defined concept that the statement is almost vacuously true. But here's one simple example: Politics in the United Kingdom can be seen to be somewhat England-dominated, due to the population density. This can lead to Scotland being underrepresented. Or does it? Maybe Scotland is represented precisely as much as it deserves to be. Or maybe not. What is fair? (It's quite amusing playing a grand strategy game and having Scotland conquer all of England by forming military alliances with Austria as well as France. Yeah, who's underrepresented now, huh?) > A better take is that, fair or not, popularity is not necessarily a good > judge of what works well in a language. Language design requires skill > and taste, and it is not obvious that the wisdom of the crowd extends > that far. Yes, this is also true. And on the rare occasions when a poll is conducted, it is purely for information, and is never binding. Citation: PEP 308. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0308/#detailed-results-of-voting The C-like question/colon syntax and a parenthesized form of if statement were both significantly more popular than the syntax that ended up implemented. If the matter had been "put to a vote", we'd have had a quite different result. And honestly, I'm glad of it. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/LCJJ7MGBUBD6UEIZW3B2U4XT4EXQMMSU/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
