I saw a previous message from Brett but I've been pretty overloaded and I ignored it. Can't recall it it was on Discourse or not. On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 2:30 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

On Oct 25, 2016, at 09:10 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

...

I have been slowly posting on all the various forums set up for this SIG over the past 3 weeks, but I've only heard from Donald on Discourse that he was wondering the same thing.

Interesting. This is the first message I've seen in a while. I wonder if I'm no longer getting notifications.

Cheers, -Barry _______________________________________________ Overload-sig mailing list overload-sig@python.org Options: https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/accounts/list-options/overload-sig.pyth... Archives: https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/overload-sig@python.org/

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 at 09:32 Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

Brett Cannon writes:

...

I have been slowly posting on all the various forums set up for this SIG over the past 3 weeks, but I've only heard from Donald on Discourse that he was wondering the same thing.

Well, two weeks ago I broke 7 ribs in a bicycle accident (most of them in two places -- the doctor was fascinated with scrolling back and forth in the CAT scan, picking out the breaks "oh there's another one!"), and have been pretty worthless since, except for the occasional tweet or -ideas post.

Ouch! Hope the recovery is quick.

...

Are we blocked on something, or are people just too busy to try and move this forward?

Personally, over the last month, I've thought about trying to pick up the thread again, and I was very lucky with the bike accident, so theoretically I could have. Yes, healing *is* draining, and there *is* pain, but obviously if I'm tweeting I could be working instead.

So, I too haven't seen anything for a couple months. ISTR Donald fiddled with the default notifications settings on Discourse, and that may be why.

So what I'm [YMMV, etc] blocked on is not really understanding what is desired (except "less mail") which makes me feel like I have little to contribute anyway. And my 30-year addiction to email, so if it isn't in my INBOX it gets ignored unless I make an effort to switch channels. Right now it's hard to muster the energy.

Minimizing communication is obviously part of it (hence the "overload" bit). I know others have bought up people ignoring expertise.

On the weekend I'll catch up with the discussions on Discourse and GitHub, and maybe I'll have some ideas going from there. However, the fact that nobody except the immediate participants noticed that there actually were discussions going on this last week suggests an experiment: we should start/continue a couple of discussions so that there will be notifications of various kinds, and each of us should try to tune the notification settings to optimal. Then discuss any variation across the participants, and come up with reasonable defaults (I don't know if it's possible to set defaults on GitHub, but we can set defaults on Discourse).

For GitHub you can set your own default in terms of automatically following repos you created, but otherwise it's all opt-in for watching.

I just mute a lot of python-ideas threads... :-( On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 4:08 PM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

On Oct 26, 2016, at 2:13 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 at 09:32 Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

...

Brett Cannon writes:

...

I have been slowly posting on all the various forums set up for this SIG over the past 3 weeks, but I've only heard from Donald on Discourse that he was wondering the same thing.

Well, two weeks ago I broke 7 ribs in a bicycle accident (most of them in two places -- the doctor was fascinated with scrolling back and forth in the CAT scan, picking out the breaks "oh there's another one!"), and have been pretty worthless since, except for the occasional tweet or -ideas post.

Ouch! Hope the recovery is quick.

Ditto. Get well soon!

...

...

Are we blocked on something, or are people just too busy to try and move this forward?

Personally, over the last month, I've thought about trying to pick up the thread again, and I was very lucky with the bike accident, so theoretically I could have. Yes, healing *is* draining, and there *is* pain, but obviously if I'm tweeting I could be working instead.

So, I too haven't seen anything for a couple months. ISTR Donald fiddled with the default notifications settings on Discourse, and that may be why.

So what I'm [YMMV, etc] blocked on is not really understanding what is desired (except "less mail") which makes me feel like I have little to contribute anyway. And my 30-year addiction to email, so if it isn't in my INBOX it gets ignored unless I make an effort to switch channels. Right now it's hard to muster the energy.

Minimizing communication is obviously part of it (hence the "overload" bit). I know others have bought up people ignoring expertise.

I think part of it (at least for me) is also the user experience around discussion. How does the tooling better aid people to participate and guide people towards a reduction in additional noise (better available search, tooling that notifies you when someone else has replied while you’re constructing your reply, across the board support for quoting multiple messages in a single message, easier ability to close discussion or redirect it to a different location and actually stop additional messages coming in are some of the ones that are particularly attractive to me).

...

On the weekend I'll catch up with the discussions on Discourse and GitHub, and maybe I'll have some ideas going from there. However, the fact that nobody except the immediate participants noticed that there actually were discussions going on this last week suggests an experiment: we should start/continue a couple of discussions so that there will be notifications of various kinds, and each of us should try to tune the notification settings to optimal. Then discuss any variation across the participants, and come up with reasonable defaults (I don't know if it's possible to set defaults on GitHub, but we can set defaults on Discourse).

For GitHub you can set your own default in terms of automatically following repos you created, but otherwise it's all opt-in for watching.

For Discourse you can set a default for new users (but you can’t adjust existing users afaik) and each user can control their existing settings. By default Discourse doesn’t auto subscribe everyone to new messages I think and at one point I switched it to new users *did* get auto subscribed, but then folks thought it would be better the other way so I switched it back.

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— Donald Stufft

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

Pruning most personal addresses.... Guido van Rossum writes:

I just mute a lot of python-ideas threads... :-(

Isn't that the best we can do, technologically? What do you wish would happen instead? (Doesn't have to be feasible; part of my problem is that I'm kinda stuck on feasibility. It would help to have some out-of-the-box ideas flying around.) The appendix is probably tl;dr, but since I already wrote it, I'll leave it in with that caveat. Regards, Steve ======================================================================== Eg, Nick works very hard to mentor people on python-ideas and never has a hard word for anybody in public as far as I can tell, yet he gets responses like "you're hostile and stifling discussion" when he tells people "there is an official documented semantics for list comprehensions in terms of a specific for loop, and that is not going to change." I don't see how moving that thread to Discourse or a GitHub issue would prevent such CoC violations, let alone the not obviously offensive "talking past each other" stuff that seems to make up the majority of python-ideas these days. Of course moving such threads to issues would have the effect that people have to *find* these conversations (and those who don't won't need muting), and *most* proposals by new contributors would simply rot in the queue since they're mostly flakier than the bug reports with patches that sometimes sit there for months. But if there's a point to python-ideas at all, surely it's to provide a venue for new contributors (who don't have the experience to start with a fully-baked idea on python-dev) and flaky ideas (which often have a real attraction if only we could find syntax -- eg, null coalescence). I suppose that if we had a cadre of "sensei-class" folks on Discourse who could moderate the insensitive and self-centered posters a few dB down, Discourse *might* help. But in my experience with Jeff Atwood's own Discourse instance so far, Jeff himself ends up putting a lot of effort into moderating discussions in the sense of providing explicit guidance on the degree of courtesy expected and backed up by the threat of (possibly temporary) ostracism. ========================================================================

On Oct 27, 2016, at 12:39 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@snarky.ca> wrote:

From my perspective as an admin on python-ideas, getting people to speak up when they're unhappy with how someone is behaving is really hard. I know of one specific person on -ideas that people have consistently complained to me about, and yet no one is willing to file an official complaint (people have either permanently muted the person or said things like "I'm so close to filing an official complaint" and then never do). And so if our community's tendency towards being very forgiving -- to a fault, IMO -- continues, then I want some way to communicate trends of how people feel about someone or a thread to help people deal with their fear of upsetting someone.

I wonder if providing some sort of official mechanism for flagging/reporting a post would help with this? Discourse has this but it shouldn’t be terribly hard to make for any system I think. My hypothesis is that people don’t do “official complaints” because they feel like you’re really going out of your way to single out a specific person, but maybe a flag/report button feels less like that? — Donald Stufft

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Brett Cannon <brett@snarky.ca> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 at 23:12 Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

...

Pruning most personal addresses....

Guido van Rossum writes:

...

I just mute a lot of python-ideas threads... :-(

Isn't that the best we can do, technologically?

What do you wish would happen instead? (Doesn't have to be feasible; part of my problem is that I'm kinda stuck on feasibility. It would help to have some out-of-the-box ideas flying around.)

- Easy muting of individuals (which I know someone is going to say you can do in email, but I don't know how many people know how to set up filters in their email client) - Some reputation score based on that muting (e.g. if someone is consistently being muted then people should know that person's reputation is somewhat tarnished) - Some way to know when people have started to ignore a thread (e.g. I bet people would like to know when Guido has walked away from a discussion)

But if that was a feature then I would probably start feeling guilt over walking away from a discussion and do it less (or more). Because then it becomes as obvious as posting "-1000. Goodbye" to the thread explicitly.

From my perspective as an admin on python-ideas, getting people to speak up when they're unhappy with how someone is behaving is really hard. I know of one specific person on -ideas that people have consistently complained to me about, and yet no one is willing to file an official complaint (people have either permanently muted the person or said things like "I'm so close to filing an official complaint" and then never do). And so if our community's tendency towards being very forgiving -- to a fault, IMO -- continues, then I want some way to communicate trends of how people feel about someone or a thread to help people deal with their fear of upsetting someone.

There is another category. Some people (I used to be one) feel the need to respond to *every* thread. While these are good people (they know Python very well, they can explain the issues well, they've been around a long time, they are committers, they are patient) I still wish they would shut up occasionally because they are become the dominant voice on the list. Maybe we should start posting traffic stats? E.g. "X started N threads and responded M times" or something.

-Brett

...

The appendix is probably tl;dr, but since I already wrote it, I'll leave it in with that caveat.

Regards, Steve

======================================================================== Eg, Nick works very hard to mentor people on python-ideas and never has a hard word for anybody in public as far as I can tell, yet he gets responses like "you're hostile and stifling discussion" when he tells people "there is an official documented semantics for list comprehensions in terms of a specific for loop, and that is not going to change." I don't see how moving that thread to Discourse or a GitHub issue would prevent such CoC violations, let alone the not obviously offensive "talking past each other" stuff that seems to make up the majority of python-ideas these days.

...

Of course moving such threads to issues would have the effect that people have to *find* these conversations (and those who don't won't need muting), and *most* proposals by new contributors would simply rot in the queue since they're mostly flakier than the bug reports with patches that sometimes sit there for months. But if there's a point to python-ideas at all, surely it's to provide a venue for new contributors (who don't have the experience to start with a fully-baked idea on python-dev) and flaky ideas (which often have a real attraction if only we could find syntax -- eg, null coalescence).

I suppose that if we had a cadre of "sensei-class" folks on Discourse who could moderate the insensitive and self-centered posters a few dB down, Discourse *might* help. But in my experience with Jeff Atwood's own Discourse instance so far, Jeff himself ends up putting a lot of effort into moderating discussions in the sense of providing explicit guidance on the degree of courtesy expected and backed up by the threat of (possibly temporary) ostracism.

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

Brett Cannon writes:

How about an anonymous count then of how many people have left a thread? I think upping the passive signal of how people are behaving might help people realize when their actions are being accepted the way they think they are.

I worry that people are not that self-conscious, and in any case they tend to blame the opposition (cf. Trump's persistent popularity with a substantial minority). It would be useful when a moderator gives the person a talking-to. Guido suggested:

...

Maybe we should start posting traffic stats? E.g. "X started N threads and responded M times" or something.

+1 to at least making them easily available on request. I also like Donald's suggestion of flagging (not "reporting") posts, rather than posters. It's content, not the person, that violates CoC.

My only worry with that is someone deciding that they need to have the highest number. But then again, we seem to not attract that kind of troll

+1

On Sat, 29 Oct 2016 at 10:16 Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

Brett Cannon writes:

...

On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 at 23:12 Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

...

...

What do you wish would happen instead? (Doesn't have to be feasible; part of my problem is that I'm kinda stuck on feasibility. It would help to have some out-of-the-box ideas flying around.)

...

- Easy muting of individuals (which I know someone is going to say you can do in email, but I don't know how many people know how to set up filters in their email client)

True. However, if you read the list via HyperKitty, this could be provided there. I don't know if GMane has that feature. This is a mitigation of the lack of facility with filters, not a cure -- but maybe it's good enough?

...

- Some reputation score based on that muting (e.g. if someone is consistently being muted then people should know that person's reputation is somewhat tarnished)

Be careful. Being a jerk isn't the only reason I mute people; sometimes I just don't care about the topics they prefer to discuss.

Sure, but I would assume it would balance out in general.

I worry that such reputations are not very useful most of the time. Reputations like that take a long time to develop; those who are reading the lists will form opinions well before those opinions get reflected in muting statistics. So they probably only benefit newcomers ("oh, he's loud, but nobody's listening").

Which is fine by me as they are the most affected by not knowing who to not necessarily focus on.

They also should decay with time. If someone goes away for a year and then comes back, there's a good chance (maybe not 50%, but far enough from zero) that they've learned a thing or two about courtesy in the meantime.

One thing they *would* be useful for is giving objective evidence to the individual that others view them negatively, in a way that doesn't involve public attacks, just silent shunning.

Exactly.

...

- Some way to know when people have started to ignore a thread (e.g. I bet people would like to know when Guido has walked away from a discussion)

You know what? If my memory serves (unfortunately it's rather self- serving on things like this), the times I've cared about whether he's muted or not are when he's said so. It verifies my own opinion on the importance of the conversation, because he seems to say so only when he cares about the outcome but has either little time or little concrete to contribute, and so mutes.

I'm fine just having a mute count in general. I really didn't meant to imply that a "Guido has muted this" badge was needed, just some way to let people know that in general people have lost interest in the thread.

...

From my perspective as an admin on python-ideas, getting people to speak up when they're unhappy with how someone is behaving is really hard. I know of one specific person on -ideas that people have consistently complained to me about,

Have you given that person a talking-to? That's something a human moderator can do with good effect that a Mute-O-Meter can't.

I have given them a talking-to twice.

...

and yet no one is willing to file an official complaint (people have either permanently muted the person or said things like "I'm so close to filing an official complaint" and then never do).

Speaking for myself, on three occasions in 2016 I have taken it on myself to write to a person off-list. In all cases I got the "I don't see I'm doing anything wrong" (and based on my own behavior in the mid-2000s, I'm in no position to definitively contradict that :-/). In two cases the S/N is infinitesimal anyway, so I muted. In the third case, we've been communicating off-list about other matters (and that person is not a frequent poster anyway).

I understand your reluctance to name names, but in my personal experience I've rarely had a consistent problem with someone or with a thread that I could identify as a CoC violation, so I'm not at all sure what you're talking about. Heck, for all I know it could be me (and as I mentioned, I have a history where it *would* have been me!) It's usually a failure to pay attention to what others are saying, but often enough it takes me multiple (sometimes dozens ;-) of posts before I get it, I would hope that's not a CoC.

It's not you. :)

...

to help people deal with their fear of upsetting someone.

Who is "someone"? The object of irritation?

I assume so.

AIUI, many of us who are irritable do write to people who irritate us off-list as I described above, asking them to moderate their own behavior. I don't fear upsetting the irritating, and in fact I have yet to experience "who are you to talk" kinds of blowback, only "thank you for your opinion, but I don't see I'm doing anything wrong".

I do fear having you or Guido think that I'm trying to get the moderators to do my dirty work. Probably that's not realistically an issue, but that's the way I feel about making official complaints.

But that's an issue. If you personally reach out off-list, then I don't know something has been viewed as upsetting. It also means I can't judge whether it's just me not liking how someone is acting or there's actually a noticeable group of people who are unhappy how someone is being. This is why I'm saying I want some transparency in how people are viewing the threads on mailing lists so I can implicitly pick up on the sentiment of the list towards certain people.

Brett Cannon writes:

Minimizing communication is obviously part of it (hence the "overload" bit).

Overload, I get. The problem we face is that "minimize" is too simplistic. The core could minimize communication by unsubscribing from -ideas, and -dev too, and communicating only via tracker issues. But sometimes you need a broader audience (Larry asking for guidance on urandom, for example). And -dev and -ideas do help to communicate the "dev culture" and architectural principles to new developers. So what we want are channels that somehow encourage appropriate communication, eliminate redundancy, and impose a certain amount of order (the "synchonicity" issue).

I know others have bought up people ignoring expertise.

Sure, but that's a content problem that as far as I can see can't be addressed by changing the channel. It requires cultivating social norms among the members. Which is a little problematic, since anybody can join in at any time.

For GitHub you can set your own default in terms of automatically following repos you created, but otherwise it's all opt-in for watching.

Yeah, well, it's OK if I ask for a pony as long as I don't complain when I don't get one, right?