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Re: Testing Discourse for Debian



Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net> writes:

> Who makes up the "younger" crowd?  sub 30? sub 20? I mean, I personally
> was in my mid-20s when I first started using Linux (college), and I had
> otherwise only been introduced to the internet via AOL.

Sub 30 was what I was thinking of.  I'm only saying there's a bit of a
statistical tendency, not that this applies to everyone, obviously.  But
when I look around at the broader development world, the majority of the
newer projects seem to not use email at all.  Even when they do, it's not
where the most useful conversation happens.

Now, in a lot of cases the real conversation happens on GitHub, which
isn't exactly the same thing as a forum.  But forums seem to play a large
role in some of the more vibrant communities (Rust, for instance).

> There is something to be said for educating "younger people" with the
> old ways -- I mean how many of these "Modern" things are just
> re-implementations of what previously existed (except with centralized
> control and "oh yeah, pay us").

This may be the case, but I think those of us who are familiar with email
have a bit of a tendency (I'm *definitely* including myself in this) to
jump straight to "let me explain to you how email already does everything
you want if you just use it properly" without bothering to ask people what
features they like and really listen to them.

Professionally, I can tell you that my younger colleagues tend to hate
email and far prefer other communication mechanisms, and that's not
because they're unaware of how email is used.  The most commonly stated
reason is that email is full of noise and pointless messages that aren't
worth reading, compared to other approaches.  That's just anecdotes, not
data, obviously, but it made me curious to understand what I might be
missing.  (My past experience is that when younger colleagues get excited
about a new way of doing things, I should pay attention, because there are
probably things that I'm missing and that I will appreciate if I look into
them more deeply.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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