Keyboard Shortcuts
ctrl + shift + ? :
Show all keyboard shortcuts
ctrl + g :
Navigate to a group
ctrl + shift + f :
Find
ctrl + / :
Quick actions
esc to dismiss
Likes
Search
Re: Now that Reddit is dying...
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýThroughout history, long-form correspondence has been really important. The ¡°long form¡± bit seems to be important. For one thing (in my experience), writing a long-form communication is more likely to make you aware of the weak points in your argument. For another, length slows things down (both composition and reply), which gives people time to think. Thinking is good. Meme-ing (which is what the Damn Kids do today) is not about that, only about scoring points. I also think that knowing your recipient won¡¯t read your emission for some goodly number of days encourages care. That suggests to me a revival of blogs might be better than a revival of the mailing list. But. I won¡¯t dispute that email thinking-through-problems isn¡¯t amazing. In my own experience (as a bystander), the design of Common Lisp mostly over email was unreasonably effective. This mailing list and the early Ruby mailing list and the extremeprogramming mailing list and the swtest-discuss mailing list were also really formative for me. But what I wonder is whether some of that oomph was because people were *trained* to do email effectively. Those habits were created because there was no faster-emotional-hit alternative, whereas now there is.?You can¡¯t have a successful reintroduction of opium in a world where fentanyl is cheaper and easier to consume. (Note: I speak as someone who made 126,300 tweets (including retweets) on Twitter before I abandoned it. So I understand the appeal of the fast emotional hit.) A final thing that occurs to me is that the early mailing lists (and the C2 Wiki) had three characteristics: - it was easy to pay attention to high value posters. - it was easy(ish) to ignore low value posters. - there was a sort of mechanism by which newbies could demonstrate their value and become known as high-value posters. (Maybe I¡¯m romanticizing it.) It helped a lot that venues were low volume. (I used to read every word of the Ruby mailing list, and I distinctly remember the day at my inlaws over Christmas vacation that I just had to give up on keeping up.) That suggests the need for curation: people who are *paid* to filter the vast idea-o-sphere into something valuable to the readers. Think ¡°The Economist¡± or ¡°The New Yorker¡±, who still have some notion of selecting what their readers *need* to read. Compare ¡°The Washington Post¡± or the ¡°New York Times¡±, which have to some extent been forced to go over to clickbait.? I guess I¡¯m thinking that the key problem in within-profession discussion these days is how to get and manage editors/curators of blog-style writings and, secondarily, mailing lists.
|
to navigate to use esc to dismiss