Mailing list debates considered harmful | Hacker News Reader

Mailing list debates considered harmful

tech.blog.aknin.name

21 pointsjnoller18 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

That's true, but it's easy to see the point at which a long discussion turns unproductive. Unfortunately, that's usually easiest in retrospect.

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

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.

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.

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".

A good one-line summary of what I meant.

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.

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.

"no end in _site_".

The various grammatical errors picked my interest as well.

That's great, next time we'll debate in my native tongue, I'm sure your grammatical errors will pique mine.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com