[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 01.02.2016 21:05, Brett Cannon wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 at 11:23 M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> Anyway, this whole discussion is way off-topic for the mailing
>> list
> 
> 
> I disagree with that. As I said in my reply to Nick Chammas, we
> occasionally need to re-evaluate our choice in tooling to make sure we are
> not ignoring improvements made in the wider world that we are ignoring. And
> this becomes especially important if the way we manage our communication
> becomes an impediment to people newcomers because the ramp-up costs are too
> high for what becomes a "unique" requirement we impose on others.

Brett, I understand where you are coming from, but I don't
follow the ramp-up costs argument.

What we should be after is better signal-to-noise ratio.
Changing ramp-up costs doesn't necessarily correlate with
this.

>> and I haven't really seen a compelling argument for
>> switching away from mailing lists completely yet, though
>> several who would like to see both the mailing list and
>> a Discourse like client for people who prefer web UI
>> and forum style discussions.
>>
> 
> This whole discussion kicked off when the point was brought up that having
> some way to infer reputation would be useful. If it was obvious who on this
> list consistently posts in an off-topic fashion, then new people would know
> that they should probably ignore those people's emails until they are more
> familiar with the mailing lists. We have persistently had this problem
> where long-time subscribers know who to mute and thus spare themselves a
> lot of time and anguish with poor actors, while new people have no idea and
> then engage people in conversations that go nowhere.

This is something good moderators should know how to
handle. I don't think technology is good at such social
interactions. Such voting features often result in shy people
who are really knowledgeable to stay away from discussions
simply because they are afraid to get poor scores.

>> I'd suggest to postpone any decision until better tools are
>> available to make this happen. Email is not going to go away,
>> but I certainly have seen a lot of other communication tools
>> come and go - and I bet there's something to learn in that :-)
> 
> As I have said before, this switch won't happen until someone takes up an
> evaluation to properly show what we would gain or lose from a switch to
> something like Discourse or HyperKitty.

Fair enough. We can continue the discussion when that
happens :-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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