Re: tracking our readers? (Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts)
On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 08:22:22AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 02:31:23PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
> > > The trust system gives me no trust at all. It is very closely bound to
> > > participation over the web interface, monitors the reading frequency and time
> > > spent on reading by users.
> > [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-does-post-tracking-work-in-discourse/115790
>
> thanks for pointing this out, Sean. This makes even using discourse
> inaccepable to me, sorry.
Same for me. The more I look into Discourse the more horrible I
find it. Several things that some people consider "advantages"
of Discourse over mailinglists are no-gos from my point of view:
- The whole "distributed moderation" concept that appears to be
one of the main points why people even consider Discourse over
email is based on user-tracking and that is an absolute no-go
for me.
- Giving users the ability to edit other people's posts is an
absolute no-go for me. If one accepts moderation at all, the
most a moderator should IMHO be able to do is to reject a
message. Allowing people to modify messages other people have
written is an invitation to abuse.
- Giving random people moderator powers based on an automatically
assigned "trust" value created by a completely <censored>
algorithm is in my view such a horrible idea that I cannot even
imagine how somebody could find anything positive in that.
- To me the whole system appears to be designed to make users
waste as much time as possible on the web interface
(gamification elements and "trust" levels). This is something
that I would expect from some commercially-operated webforums
where such tactics appear to be rather common, but not from
a system to be used by Debian developers trying to collaborate
on a technical project.
- The system is effectively unusable offline.
Those functions that are listed by the Discourse proposers as
the big advantages of Discourse over email are not available
for offline use at all, and the email interface doesn't even
seem to handle basic requirements such as proper quoting, which
makes it IMHO unsuitable for any practical use.
And yes, contrary to what some of the people proposing a
web-based system over email lists seem to think: there is quite
a number of people who handle their list email largely in
offline situations such as when being on the train to and from
work for several hours a day.
As a personal note: compared to my email client I find the
discourse web interface very unwieldly and impractical (like most
web forums). This is of course a matter of taste and personal
preferences, but exactly that is an important point. With
mailinglists everybody can use a client that suits one's personal
preferences, while web-based systems inevitably force a
particular user interface onto every user. This one interface
naturally cannot fit everbody's personal preferences and
therefore makes the task of following and taking part in
discussions actually harder for a significant number of people
compared to performing the same tasks on a mailinglist.
Regards,
Karsten
--
Ich widerspreche hiermit ausdrücklich der Nutzung sowie der
Weitergabe meiner personenbezogenen Daten für Zwecke der Werbung
sowie der Markt- oder Meinungsforschung.
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