

Mailing list debates considered harmful - jnoller
http://tech.blog.aknin.name/2010/05/29/mailing-list-debates-considered-harmful/

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thunk
I'm curious to see how Wave fares under a python-dev-size debate, and what
creative curating can accomplish.

Sometimes I think the optimal solution to online discussion is a
reconfigurable 3d visualization of the graph of comment-nodes. In one
configuration, node size, location, connectedness and proximity to the core of
the graph would signify a comment's relative importance and "page-rank". The
ability to respond to and "link" to multiple other comments would be useful
here. Another would be a more standard tree-based visualization of the
comments in time, but without the misleading vertical ranking of root nodes.
Another visualization might be a straight serialization in time, similar to
mailing lists.

I imagine the nodes to be sort of bouncy, physicsy bubbles that can be nudged
around, and that the view can rotate in three dimensions and zoom in and out
to focus on specific subthreads.

Other times I think that's _way_ too heavy-weight a solution, that it would be
confusing, that it might not actually solve anything, and that we do pretty
well with the threaded comment trees we have now. I actually kind like that
everyone sees the same thing on the page, shared experience and whatnot.

I dunno. Online discussion is hard.

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jrockway
Does the outcome of these debates ever matter? I always think of them as a way
to keep the naysayers busy while the contributers actually implement
something.

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thunk
C'mon. I know you're being mildly facetious, but "naysayers" and contributors
aren't nearly so cleanly segregated. And debate often leads to important
decisions that can't just be coded away.

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jrockway
Most of the time, the long discussions aren't about anything important. Nobody
cares how you build your nuclear reactor, but everyone wants to debate the
color of the bikeshed.

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thunk
Sometimes they aren't, sometimes they are. Something about babies and
bathwater. The ideal online debate platform would algorithmically marginalize
bikeshedding.

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pg
"The ideal online debate platform would algorithmically marginalize
bikeshedding."

That is a great sentence, in both senses.

It's hard to do, though YC does have several features for this, and they seem
to work to some extent.

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perlpimp
One can improve on NNTP, add verified identities etc. You can do so via GnuPG
and some combination of software bits.

Usenet was built just for this, I don't understand why people don't use it
widely. Forums are such POS for this kind of thing, they fragment the field
make it impossible to search for a discussion in any sort of uniform way.

my 2c

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Tawheed
I got chills while reading your article, because as a single founder of a
bootstrapped startup, the problem of dated mailing lists and discussion forums
is the exact problem I’ve been trying to solve and this is one of the first
times someone articulated the problem so well.

Check out my startup: <http://BraintrustHQ.com>.

If anyone is interested, I’d love to work with you and whomever else is
interested to see how we can make this free and make it work for the Open
Source Community.

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tbrownaw
From the first couple paragraphs, this sounds like it's mostly a complaint
about the existence of bikeshed topics. Which exist in any discussion medium.

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philh
Not really. The problem isn't "people are debating trivial things instead of
letting shit get done". It's "people are debating all sorts of things, and
it's impossible to work out what state each of the separate debates is in".

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teolicy
A good one-line summary of what I meant.

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Tycho
I think Hacker News has the right idea - show responses in their own threads,
use upvoting to push the best stuff to the top, use downvoting to keep
everything civil (very important), and give people a chance to edit their
comment if they see it getting immediate negative feedback.

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DanielBMarkham
There is a need here that is huge and unmet.

There are also sociological and psychological issues that come into play. It's
not simply a matter of who makes the best argument.

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chaosgame
"no end in _site_".

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a1k0n
The various grammatical errors picked my interest as well.

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HeyLaughingBoy
You mean like using the word "picked" instead of "piqued?"

