Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 23, 2022 15:19 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Leaving python-dev behind by rjones
Parent article: Leaving python-dev behind

> This is why the alternative for discourse isn't email. It's software like facebook groups, github, and discord
> When examined in that light it is pretty obvious that discourse is the plain superior option.

Except for the whole "every silo has to be independently polled, with an independent client that makes automation very difficult (if not outright impossible), making it impossible to scale" problem. Because its in the interest of each of those silos to make everything happen inside said silos, so users can be mined and monetized and "engaged" all way into the sewer.

Sure, the "new way" has made a much lower barrier to entry for the masses (and that's genuinely good!) but no matter how useful a ladder is for getting to the roof of your two-storey house, it's just not going to work for getting to the top of a 40-floor building!

At the end of a day, email is not even a service, but a "protocol" -- but most people only see it as an "app".

</garumph>

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 23, 2022 17:04 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

See, this is exactly what I referred to at the top of this thread. rjones makes the effort of describing some of email's problems. Then you quote the small part of his message that is _not_ about email's problems and repeat some of the (very real) issues with email's competition. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that except for the sheer quantity of it: it is happening a million times in the immense majority of discussions about email, everyone keeps talking about how the competition sucks trying hard to avoid discussing email - cause you know, email is so good, how come people don't love it? Extremely little of the discussion is focused on email's problems.

I think Linus Torvalds once answered in some interview "I actually don't really care what Windows does, it's not that interesting". Of course that's too extreme because you do want to "steal" good ideas from your competition, (as opposed to ranting about how it sucks), and this is what open-source has been doing since forever - except for email. However that sentence makes a good point: focus on the engineering of _your_ "product"; on what you want to win.

There's a strange emotional attachment that develops when you start mastering a complex tool. In a former life I wrote git scripts to help me backport thousands of patches. That and others things cause me to regularly marvel at git's power and flexibility. Fortunately, I'm brought back down to earth every time someone new to git tries to do something simple and asks me for help. If you never get back down to earth then you get complacent: "what email problems?"

"Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible."

We've all seen people in these discussions saying things like "Good, email keeps noobs away from the Linux kernel". This is both sad and funny (and fortunately rare). This is funny because it is almost admitting that there are some problems but no wait, these are not problems they're actually a test! It's by design! Hilarious.

Asking "noobs" to pass an "email test" instead of a coding test so they are immediately ready to deal with the high volume of spam and noob contributions that streched maintainers must be able to filter with when... using email? OK, I can see a little bit of recursive logic here :-)

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 24, 2022 0:45 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> There's a strange emotional attachment that develops when you start mastering a complex tool.

Is it so strange? Literally every field of human endeavour has a notion of "expertise" that is usually celebrated [1], and part of that mastery is learning to effectively utilize the tools of that field.

What makes this field so special that what's "good enough" for novices is expected (nay, demanded) to be enough for everyone else as well?

Information management and effective communication are more strategic than ever these days. But instead, we're intentionally crippling ourselves (and handing our entire digital identities over to $bigcorp [2]) because we can't be bothered.

[1] modern politics notwithstanding
[2] whose ToS says they can drop you at any time for any reason, with zero recourse

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 24, 2022 17:30 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> What makes this field so special that what's "good enough" for novices is expected (nay, demanded) to be enough for everyone else as well?

Not 100% sure what particular solution you're referring to but good tools should always make "simple things simple and complex things possible".

The fact is that most people find it very convenient[*] to submit a one-line, typo fix on Githab and then walk away but very time-consuming when the code review requires finding and configuring properly an email client that supports plain text, bottom-posting and what not. These requirements are dying much faster than what's left of email.

[*] and yes that convenience comes at a price, we know.

> But instead, we're intentionally crippling ourselves (and handing our entire digital identities over to $bigcorp [2]) because we can't be bothered

Yes, we know. We've read that a million times. And some. Yet another change of subject.

What alternative to $bigcorp have you contributed to? Did you help understand why email is dying or even help fix it? Have you explored or contributed to any new alternative, can you recommend any?

I did absolutely nothing to help fix this particular problem but I'm not complaining that people are too stupid to leave email (a.k.a. "blame the user") in every discussion either.

People who complain that Windows is evil (tm) generally contribute to Linux or some alternative. What makes email so special that most people who keep complaining about its competition do absolutely nothing to fix it, not even acknowledging the reasons why it's dying and keep claiming that people are just too stupid to see how good it is?

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 25, 2022 3:46 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> What alternative to $bigcorp have you contributed to? Did you help understand why email is dying or even help fix it? Have you explored or contributed to any new alternative, can you recommend any?

I don't actually have an inherent problem with $bigcorp providing services; what I take issue with is intentional lock-in that tends to come along with it. And nothing locks you in like using $bigcorp's identity services tied to a domain you don't control.

But you are right, the battle has been over for two decades. Google giving away a gig of storage for free was the beginning of the end.

You can't compete with services by providing software. And when you're providing a service, you can't compete with free unless you have some other way of making money -- such as selling (indirect) access to the data you've mined. which in turn is only possible if you're operating at a sufficiently massive scale to where micropennies finally pile up.

And as I mentioned earlier, most folks don't see anything beyond the "app" -- I'm not asked for my email address; instead I'm asked 'gimme your gmail' or something like that.

(What do I do? I'm self-hosting, and made minor contributions to various federated systems. I advocate the importance of owning your own digital identity, and that starts with domain names. And that's about all I can do, because at the end of the day, you're still in competition with "free")

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Jul 25, 2022 6:13 UTC (Mon) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

Being proud of your accomplishments and knowledge is a good thing. I think what marcH is referring to is the human tendency to get attached to our mastery, that we don't like it when our mastery is discarded by external changes. Like we set up mutt, subscribed to the mailing lists, mastered our procmail and customised our workflow to the n-th degree... so everyone else should too! You can't throw away my mastery and use a different medium unless the new medium is better in every single way than email, otherwise I will complain about the new tool's shortcomings from the rooftops!

I say this as someone equally guilty of this kind of feeling sometimes... if I had to climb the stairs to the top to master it, everyone else should have to do the same. If newcomers can just take the escalator instead of the stairs, that effort I put in was just superfluous and I don't get to feel as proud of it.

We all know email is a terrible medium. I haven't tried things like Discourse, I don't read any mailing lists or contribute much to OSS nowadays. But the centre of gravity has moved, and just as when I started I had to join mailing lists, now you have to join something else. It's still the same bazaar, with a different entry path.