Re: Testing Discourse for Debian
Ihor Antonov <ihor@antonovs.family> writes:
> On Sunday, April 12, 2020 11:51:27 AM PDT Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The forum to which you sent this message is already moderated and has
>> been for months. I suspect you didn't even notice.
> So how then you need more moderation possibilities with Discourse?
So, I should be clear that I personally have only a small amount of
experience with Discourse and haven't looked into the details of its
features. But there are a lot of reasons for investigating that sort of
forum software, more generically. Here are a few.
1. A database-driven discussion system that supports updates lets you go
beyond the moderation that you're worried about (rejecting messages)
and do other forms of moderation that help improve the quality of
discussion without removing messages. Examples include splitting
threads that have digressed from the original topic to create more
focused discussions, pinning important summaries so that people see the
current status of the discusison quickly, closing old threads so that
people properly open a new discussion instead of replying to some
resolved discussion with a different problem, and even just sorting,
classifying, and tagging threads so that people can find the
discussions they care about more easily.
2. You can indicate agreement with a proposal or message without adding
more words that everyone has to read. The +1 reply in email is clunky
and adds a lot of noise. Often it's useful to be able to get a quick
count of participants who agree with an idea but don't want to write
their own extended message about it.
3. There is some age correlation with the type of communication mechanism
one is comfortable with, and reason to believe that younger people skew
towards being more comfortable with forums than with email. If you
didn't have to learn email client skills (particularly the type that
Debian demands, which are drastically different than how email is used
in most jobs), it's not very welcoming to have to learn those skills in
order to participate in the project. They're a lot less trivial than I
think people who have been using email for a long time realize. I've
had nearly 30 years to hone my ability to quickly sort through huge
quantities of email and reply in a readable way, which means it's easy
for me to forget how much work that took, how much effort I've put into
customizing and learning a top-end email client, and how many of the
rules are inobvious and arcane.
Not everyone cares about this sort of thing, but I would wager that Debian
is currently skewed towards people who cope well with email because we
have good email skills as a bar to entry. Expanding the set of people who
can effectively contribute requires looking outside our own comfort zone.
> I do not advocate for free-for-all. It is just the ability to decide on
> who gets to say what should not be in the hands of a single person /
> small group, it is way to easy to get corrupted/biased/controlled.
And yet the Internet is full of successfully moderated forums that create
very little drama because they're just quietly more usable.
You have to trust the moderators, and you have to have some mechanism to
evaluate that trust and to discuss it and possibly revoke it if something
goes horribly awry. This is work that should be done, but it's work
that's very doable.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Debian users currently trust
Debian developers with the security of their computers, which I think is a
higher bar than trusting other Debian developers with the moderation of
our discussions. These discussions often strike me as being weirdly
disproportional and inconsistent about how we extend trust. We trust each
other with hugely important and critical things, and then are full of
mistrust about minor and often quite trivial things, such as whether or
not one gets to have the final word in some war of words that nearly
everyone will have forgotten by next month.
> Coming from a corrupted-to-the-bone post USSR country I speak from
> personal experience of being on receiving end of that situation. You may
> think that it is for the best, but it is not.
This is a common argument, but I find it entirely unpersuasive.
Censorship is highly concerning when done by a government because the
government can use force to prevent any other form of discussion except
the one the government controls. The idea that Debian could do this is
absurd.
If moderation of Debian forums suppressed some problem that a lot of
people really cared about, there would be an explosion of discussion
elsewhere, huge uptake of the discussion in other places over which Debian
has no control (LWN, for instance), and alternative forums being
repurposed or newly created all over the place.
This is a community full of people entirely capable of setting up a new
mailing list or forum on the fly in an afternoon. Debian doesn't have a
monopoly on the press, or any realistic ability to suppress discussions.
We couldn't be more unlike a government.
It's sadly common for people who want to fight about something on project
forums to claim that they're being censored and unable to get their
message out. It's also quite dubious. People love controversy and free
software developers tend to be a suspicious and anti-establishment lot.
Actual controversies with even a hint of credibility spread like wildfire.
If no one is willing to pick up on a controversy and amplify it, it's
worth considering the possibility that's because everyone who looked at it
seriously has decided it's bullshit.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: