Digging into the community's lore with lei

Posted Dec 15, 2021 22:11 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
Parent article: Digging into the community's lore with lei

Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. After all, developers are a social network, too. Imagine receiving an stream of messages/patches from the developers you are subscribed to, and resending to your subscribers those that you find interesting/relevant...

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Digging into the community's lore with lei

Posted Dec 16, 2021 12:23 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

What about people who AVOID social networks because they see this as a PROBLEM, not a solution.

What about uber-developers where you are not interested in 99% of what they're doing?

Cheers,
Wol

Digging into the community's lore with lei

Posted Dec 20, 2021 1:56 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> > Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. After all, developers are a social network, too. Imagine receiving an stream of messages/patches from the developers you are subscribed to, and resending to your subscribers those that you find interesting/relevant...

+1, I've always hated this "IN or OUT" binary aspect of mailing list subscriptions. Memories of middle school and exclusive groups of "cool kids" :-)

> What about people who AVOID social networks because they see this as a PROBLEM, not a solution.

Whether it's coffee machines, Twitter, LWN comments, conferences, WhatsApp groups, dinner parties or direct messaging, "social networks" in a very broad sense have always and will always provide plenty enough of the "serendipity" mentioned in the article. Humans are extremely social animals.

Granted, the algorithms of some (a?)social networks are tuned to make money out of confirmation bias and irrational response but let's not throw the baby with the bathwater. Like so many others before it, "modern" social network technology is neither good or bad, it's what we make of it and in this case especially how we _pay_ for it. Funding it with our attention and brain time: now that is the bad idea.

> Then again, such a world sounds like fertile ground for news sites providing a broad view of what's happening in the community, so perhaps it's not an entirely bad thing.

Indeed.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

Posted Dec 20, 2021 17:21 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. [...] Imagine receiving an stream ...

A "stream" is in fact what our inboxes have already become a long time ago: a lossy medium EVEN for people not subscribing to mailing lists much. This happens because anyone can dump anything on anyone else's TODO list without needing any sort of permission. "Spam" is not just what people think, there are more subtle forms. I'm sure it was fine when the Internet was created and everyone knew each other. Not that great in today's information overload era and basically why:

> Kids These Days want nothing to do with it, and email has lost its charm with many others as well.

Where is the big "unsubscribe" button? To be in control again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRE728QiO7Y
"It's Impossible to Leave a WhatsApp Group" | Foil Arms and Hog

Digging into the community's lore with lei

Posted Dec 24, 2021 13:39 UTC (Fri) by tlw (guest, #31237) [Link]

we already had that, it was called g+