CouchDB retrospective
groups.google.com
groups.google.com
Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.
Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
But does the "community overall" need any saving?
The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.
I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.
Hopefully, if & when everyone starts using Persona, it will be nearly as simple to start using a random website as it is to join a random subreddit, and we will finally be able to stop being members of excessively large "communities" like reddit and fb.
Of course, your identity then was your email address. I don't know what we were thinking!
The expedition to Sicily by Athens in 413 BC The run up in the Facebook stock price on IPO day Widespread investments in failsafe CDOs pre the crash of 2008
If crowds have any wisdom, it dissipates pretty quickly when they gather and start sharing opinions.
Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_ different experiences.
CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code).
Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are NOTHING but "How do I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists).
CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly ignored for 10 years)
With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with open-source)
I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0
Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.
which is about the link I posted, so...
... um.
Now what?