webwanderings

Tangent about threads and Slack culture.

I have noticed that there are people who either purposefully, or unconsciously, do not use threads. They litter the stream by making sentences instead of paragraphs. What I don't understand is how could Slack not see this as an issue?

From my individual's perspective, I don't get the idea of chats as a one liner when topics should be contextualized via threads.

ping yahoo.com

Old habits die hard.

As much as I was in awe of WaPo's tablet app (on Amazon's Fire), I despise their website on the public Internet ever since they have started the paywall flags. Neither NYT, nor WaPo are going to solve the world's publishing business model on the Internet. The author here makes a lot of good points. And someone please tell me exactly why Bezo wrote his letter on Medium and not anywhere else?

Solution is simple. The more money you have, the greater is your responsibility towards others (beings and nature).

Taking things out by force (from anyone and anything) is never a solution, because everything is relative in this world, including your wealth.

As an OP, I'm engaged in this topic (you can look at my other comments on the primary thread).

I'd provide a comment back to your comment here but two of your first sentences fall into the category of ... not providing any direct value to my original comment. In your first comment you disagree with me. Fine. In your second comment, you are asking a question to a question, and then you judge me back. There's nothing I can say about this.

WRT to your third sentence/paragraph, about ..

> If someone comments more generally, philosophically, 'a level up', is that off-topic? If someone comments on one tiny part of the topic, is that off-topic? I suspect one person's off-topic is another's insightful comment.

I agree with you above. It is a subjective matter for sure. But you probably missed my point about this question asked as collective whole. If you look at things individually, then yes, it makes sense what you're saying. But I am asking this question from the collective-whole perspective. It isn't about one or two person. It is about everyone, looking at things from the platform's perspective. I tend to think, all comments (short form or long form) if they are on topic, provide value to the post at hand.

How about an example of say, someone shows something new on HN, and the number of commenters providing alternate services, line up? I guess the 'shameless-plug' types are fine (because they provide value) but my point still would be, why not just discuss the pros and cons of what is being shared?

Or, another example may be. It has been consistent, that whenever a thread starts up about any given password managers, the discussion right away diverge to myriad of other password generators. Back in the days, it used to be about bookmarks managers.

I agree that this is a subjective topic in itself. My main concern is that as the number of people commenting gets large, the value being derived out of any post, gets challenging. My argument here is, that this should have been potentially managed better online.

All good points.

But why 'less interesting' when comments are meant to be explicit to the OP?

Wouldn't the fact that there are ample opportunities to post diverse topics through multiple individual posts, provides even more ample opportunities to comment in-context on each one of them individually?

Contrast this to an offline world scenario, where let's say, you are in a setting with limited time on your hand. Your conversation (on any given topics) will start and end at some point because you are not going to be around together for long. In such offline contexts, you naturally may have various continuous topics to discuss and it is fine if things diverge.

But online, you technically do not have such time restrictions. Plus, you have a platform which facilitates contextual discussions which can stay neat and tidy. My argument here is, that we tend to not take advantage of the real value of the online forums (by being all over, as if we are not going to get the second opportunity).

I tend to think that the concise comments online, on an exact topic at hand, provide collective value, as opposed to diverged sentences or two. This does not mean that 100 people would write counter-article and/or dissertation on the OP (that would really be boring for sure). But instead of 100 short and diverged comments, 5 focused comments (counter, etc) are better overall in providing better value for the time.

Thanks for sharing. Nice. I'm not a programmer but I have taken many courses all over the web (I think I only lack practice). This talk reminds me of the Edx course on functional programming using DrRacket. As the talk suggests about the boring and bureaucratic aspect of the recipe design, I think that's exactly the reason why I couldn't finish that Edx course twice, though I am convinced that this design/recipe methodology to learning to program, is the right solution (which is absent from the pedagogy of a lot of courses). This talk makes me want to try and take that edx course again, the third time!

There is almost always a main idea to any given topic (it starts and ends by saying something specific).

> And how do you even decide what's on topic and what's not?

Good point. But in general, one can sense an overall picture emerge out of a comment stream. As you scroll and read comments, you can tell when the stream provides value or not. My point here is, that when people do not stay consistent to the original topic, the value of the comment stream goes down. And here, I'm not talking about comments being totally out of context of any given original topic. Even a slight divergence leads to unnecessary path down the road.

> I think this is a product of how humans think in general.

Yes, that's exactly what I am questioning. Why does it have to be exactly the same when we are online, as opposed to being in person?

A submitted article, opinion piece (or news, etc, anywhere) is almost always on a particular topic or main idea. Who would consistently and daily read an author who goes all over in his/her thinking on any given article? There is almost always a "point" of any given article and the submitted story. Why then the comment stream goes all over?

> I don’t think anything can be done about this.

Well I don't know if I agree entirely. If nothing else, people can stay silent if they don't necessarily have anything in particular to say about the topic at hand (expert or somewhat expert opinion or additional info). Staying silent wouldn't necessarily lead things to 'too sterile'. This can possibly be achieved by being cognizant and conscious.

My point is that a thread (topic) + comment mechanism provides a feature for humans to stay consistent at any given time. You have a submission box and you have a comment box. That's what I specifically mean by 'technology is designed to achieve that goal'.

> I believe a good conversation does branch out and lead one into a myriad to topics

If you look at this from your personal/individual perspective, then yes, that's no issue. But look at it from the perspective of the platform and the audience as a collective whole. The "branching out" leads to reduction in quality for everyone (may not necessarily so for one or two people who are engaged on the branched out topic). People who are not engaged, may not necessarily achieve anything if there are tons of branches under one topic.

No it has not. An average person wouldn’t have time to tweak the unknown changes thrown by unknown developers at them for their kids viewing experience. Nobody should trust the YT for kids because their primary motivation is not kids safety or education. When my daughter uses PBS Kids or Khan Academy Kids, I don’t have to worry about what they are throwing at her (relatively). YT on the other hand is a pure disaster waiting to happen to parents, if they don’t know (I was in that boat for some time).

Have you investigated their rabbit hole for children? YT for Kids simply needs to die. They are evil.

I bet this is a typical story across the board in US. The "salesman (or woman)" are just that. They are barely trained as technician in this field. But they are trained to sell.

I tried this. They wouldn't take the return of empty frames. In any case, the cost was cheap enough to try. The frame quality is good enough for the price.

This is nothing compared to what they serve to kids. I long for the TV days when it was safe for kids to watch public TV or PBS. Google is single handedly responsible for fast evolving humans to a time when kids are no longer safe (and there's no oversight assurance by any entity except for the parents themselves).

The better question is: is it possible for people to be diplomatic? (with empathy and care towards each other and the environment).

You would have been down voted to hell for saying this here when Chrome came out. But I bet you know this already.

Google did to Firefox what it did to Yahoo, Altavista, Excite etc. When you can sell ‘6 minutes Abs’ who would buy ‘7 minutes Abs’?

Chrome was faster when it came out. I was on Win7 back in the days and I was being down voted. The proof is in the pudding.

I can still feel the sounds of Riven in my mind. It was fun moving around and touching things.

First thought: Helm. Second, unappealing brand name.

Is it Helm?

These people/companies are far and few actually, and they can decide to eliminate such mechanisms. The bots have used the lazy nature of humans to make a shortcut for economic advantage. It has uncontrollably spawned the culture of link baiting and downfall of truth and investigative journalism. Remember that humans first built the social sharing feature before bots showed up. Eliminate the bots and you’re only left with human social sharing on equal footing.

> curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation.

Why not turn them off entirely? The least of self regulation these popular social media companies can do for humans.

How are you throwing Indian cultural entities? It doesn't seem to make sense, though I have not read your literature.

They should have taken over docker. Instead, they went old fashioned. Fine. But this probably doesn’t scare competition away (MS, AWS, Google).

Hey, this is pretty cool. Just watched your videos. You certainly have a tool which is natural for average person's use, but you may have a barrier in natural use. The page marks is not a natural activity, but scrolling is. So if the system remembers where you are in the document as you scroll while reading, then that's a winner. In addition, a bookmarklet/icon in the browser itself could be better (but you most likely know this already).

In any case, many people have tried creating such a tool. I once used to believe that such functionalities should be part of the browser itself. But there's always been a disconnect between local files and browser. Now in the mobile world, it is even difficult to stay in sync.

Try IBM Cloud Private, it is free.

1. Failure of not being able to evolve with time, and improve. 2. Degradation of value out of commenting system. 3. The bias quotient and compartmentalized thinking process towards stories being selected for front page. 4. The influx of Redditors.

Everything "agile" when forced from the top, becomes a lie. I'm talking about big orgs and teams.

You throw methodologies around; you create and change names and labels all the time. It makes no difference. It is only when people self-adopt the philosophy behind 'being agile', and when the 'leaders lead', it makes a difference for everyone.

The new design is pretty good actually (change is good this time around, to defy the stereotype!). But, how do I get it updated on my Win 10 machine? It seems the update does not carry forward everywhere with you.

Yes, but what purpose does any work-related communication serve? The communication almost always is (and should be) around the tasks, activities, projects etc. Tools like Slack do not provide hierarchy and organization. Tools like kanban on the other hand, do.