[Python-ideas] Clearer communication

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 06:42:33PM +0100, Adrien Ricocotam wrote:
> I'm kinda new to those mailing lists and those are the only ones I ever
> subscribed so I'm a bit in the audience you're targeting James.

Hi Adrien, I see that you first posted in November and haven't posted 
since.

> What I think is bad using mailing list it's the absence of votes. I'd often
> like to just hit a "+1" button for some mails just to say to the author I'm
> with him and I think s.he's ideas are great.

That sounds pretty spammy to me. The last thing I want to see is 
something (either technology or culture) encouraging people to flood the 
list with a bunch of content-free "+1" or "metoo!" messages.

The occasional "I agree but have nothing else to say" message is okay, 
but I wouldn't want to see fifty a day.

This isn't Facebook or Reddit, where +1 Likes cause messages to move to 
the top of your feed. (And thank goodness for that.) This is a technical 
mailing list where the worth of a proposals usually depends on merit, 
not the number of votes.


> In some of the recent threads,
> some of the ideas I agreed with were just smashed by others. I couldn't
> give my two cents and the debate juste ended and I couldn't say the author
> I was behind him.er.

I see that the Reply button on your email client does work, so you 
clearly *can* give your two cents worth (which is exactly what you are 
doing now).

And the nature of email is that you can reply to any message in your 
inbox, no matter how old. You can reply to a ten year old message 
provided you still have it available in a mail folder, resurrecting 
the thread.

Whether it is polite to resurrect such long-dead threads, or whether 
anyone else will respond, are separate questions.

I realise that sometimes people are busy and cannot reply immediately to 
a discussion. There have been times that I have not been able to respond 
to a thread until long after it has faded away naturally, and I have 
*chosen* to not respond because I decided that the discussion had been 
settled and I didn't care enough to restart the discussion.

(Sometimes a discussion settles to "nobody can decide so the status quo 
wins". See Nick Coghlan's blog.)

But within reason, if you have something well thought out and/or 
important to say, you can and should just reply to a post and say it.


> Another thing I think is not good is the absence of
> little chit-chat 

This mailing list is often too busy as it is, without encouraging 
chit-chat.

    "Hi Bob, how are the wife and kids? I've been pretty good myself, 
    thanks for asking, but my old injury has been aching a bit. Did I 
    ever tell you the story about that, its quite funny. What do you 
    think of Trump's latest shocking comment? Did you see that hilarious 
    video about a cat? Did you learn the latest trick that doctors don't 
    want you to know? Oh, I nearly forgot, your proposal for adding GOTO 
    to Python and removing for-loops is an awesome idea, +1."


> and editing. Actually, a lot of emails are just
> explanations of what the authors meant. That's pretty spammy and a few
> messages exchanged + editing would correct this spammy thing.

I'm confused. First you complain that "a lot of emails are just 
explanations of what the authors meant". That's a *good* thing, surely. 
This is a technical discussion list, and if a message is unclear, then 
explaning what you meant should make it more clear.

And then you say "a few messages exchanged ... would correct this" but 
what do you think those messages exchanged would be if not explanations 
of what the authors meant?


> In another hand, I think mailing lists are great to avoid short and useless
> messages. There's no spammy message like "I'm ok" which could be replaced
> by just a "+1" button.

Which does what? Send a +1 email to a thousand people? That's pretty 
spammy.

>  It forces us using LBYL principle (@poke Robert) and
> it (imho) better fills the needs of such discussions.
> 
> As you may have get it, I'd rather a forum like thing rather than mailing
> lists but mailings lists are great.

Mailing lists and web forums each have their advantages and 
disadvantages, but in general, I find web forums far noisier and of less 
value.

In the future this list may be migrated to Mailman 3 which includes a 
more modern web-forum-like interface as well as email.

http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/userguide.html

As I understand it, there have already been a few low-volume Python 
mailing lists migrated to Mailman 3, and if they end up being successful 
eventually the rest will follow.


-- 
Steve