At least I'm not crazy, but I am also so sad https://discuss.python.org/t/disappointed-and-overwhelmed-by-discourse/982/78

Like.... Discourse has a fatal flaw that Hyperkitty was explicitly designed to avoid. Yet somehow it's getting unleashed on people and causing alienation all over the place.

It caters to new users at the cost of the ones who are already there.

So then the rhetoric goes, oh you selfish privileged grey beard, you have ninja email skills. A new user won't have that. So you are elitist / non inclusive if you deny this new shiny thing. BTW mailing lists are ancient.

Right but here's the problem:

http://discourse.someproject.com  is not the center of my whole world. For call its faults even slack gets this and lets you nav between slack instances in one UI.

FLOSS contribs tend to contributed across multiple projects. So instead of one email client they get email+ tabs × number of projects = huge burden

"oh but discourse has a mailing list mode" you say

Hyperkittys approach is that you leave the users you have alone, and augment the preexisting system to cater to the new user group.

No the UI isn't where I would have liked yet, but it is newbie friendly, and folks more comfortable w email are unaffected.

Discourse made bad core UX decisions but executed well. I believe Hyperkitty made good core UX decisions (OK I'm biased) but doesn't have the resources Discourse does for UI execution.

While I in the past have allowed myself to get deeply depressed about this - esp when the community I designed HK for then decided to go Discourse and I got criticized for being stuck in the past trying to support email still - I do know now the best solution doesn't always win.

The stuck in the past / greybeard / ancient 1990s tech really is a very rich narrative that gets thrown around offhandedly or in annoyance but never truly examined.

I did a dual major. One was Electronic Media Arts and Communication. A core course was about media, technology, and society

That course was how I was first introduced to Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message.")

But we also talked about how for example, what did ppl say about newspapers when radio came out, radio when TV came out, broadcast when cable / satellite came out...

At the time video streaming and video chats were not superviable like today, pre-YouTube days. (can girls w 30s between frames were all the rage)

But that program definitely knew today's internet fueled media landscape was coming and prepared us for it.

So... no, I do not think email, mailing lists, IRC are ancient and should be abandoned. Do you know what sucks? We wasted all this fucking time building hubris-fuelled incompatible walled gardens trying to stake a claim and cash grab rather than allow people to communicate

You what maybe was more important than the invention of the telephone? The institution of a single standard address space so I can call someone in San Diego, in Galway, in Yokohama using the same handset, the same account, the same lines, with just the numbers on the dialer

It is fucking insanity that I have to have no less than 12 separate browser tabs open to monitor chat to do my job.

It's like a group of 20 people in a tribe 2000 years ago decided to each invent their own language in hopes of being famous for posterity rather than communicating and being understood by the people right in front of them

(did those people get killed by wild boars?)

Hyperkitty tries to build on the existing infrastructure. Not make yet another thing to float in the sea of trash that surrounds us all here on the internet. Taking that as a base and building on top, iterating.

1990 was 30 years ago. That is not ancient. I have a phone number and use a dial pad to call people, but phones are much older than 30 yrs and somehow they are not ancient?

This is also why I like Matrix, a lot. It is an open standard. It has a vibrant community, an active upstream, lots of clients, and is backwards compatible with ORC and bridges a crapton of the trash floating in the sea so I hopefully wont need 12 windows

Similarly to how I get poopooed over advocating for Hyperkitty I get poopooed for advocating for matrix. Oh, telegram is better they say, or Mattermost, or rocketchat, or slack...

The communication tool space is saturated with trash because we all communicate so I guess everyone thinks they're an expert and has the hubris to think they'll build some new thing way better and it will "win" such a male mindset

The point of communication.... community.... commonality.... you have to be broadly compatible. The walled gardens are antithetical to that. The lack of standards.

Build on the existing standards! Dont let them rot on purpose from neglect then complain they're ancient. UPDATE THEM. Why is this a radical proposition?

You know previously, before we were abstract astronauted to the moon, the physicality of the hardware was a nice check on this hubris-fueled chaos. There are only so many frequencies in that band, so only so many TV channels.

When everything is abstract there are no physical limits.

And we apparently don't have the wisdom to impose reasonable limits on ourselves to achieve the point - communication.

So...

NO. I do NOT like Discourse. I couldn't give a flying fuck what it's license is.

And don't tell me I'm a mean old greybeard who doesn't care about including new and less technical users, OK?

At least pay attention to the cogent, rational argument that I make here backed by an actual background in digital media and communications.

I'm a UX DESIGNER you think I don't know that the mailing list and IRC experiences for new users SUCKS??

Let me tell you what sucks more....

Changing your core communication platform (or just heaping on new ones as they come out) cyclically every 5, 3, 2 years trying to keep up with the latest hot shit.

Red Hat has been using Mailman since before I worked there and I can read mailing lists posts all the way back to 1998.

There is value in that

I am a fucking nutcase sure, but I spend a surprising amount of my free time reading 1900-1950s newspaper articles from Omaha and Brooklyn, occasionally Ireland

Back when the gossip columns were written in the 1930s, the technology didn't exist to OCR text and make decades of newspaper copy searchable by a single person in seconds...

But because of that later on I can read and smile at the exploits of my great uncles and aunt gallivanting around Brooklyn and learning more about them.

The newspaper technology was augmented via scanning, OCR, search

There is value in longevity in media and communications.

That value benefits the 31337 h4x0rs, the newbies, and people not even born yet.

I understand the siren call of reimplementing the world all over again, afresh, anew every other year... but let's have some discipline as an industry and ignore the call once in a while, please

So just one more time for the folks in the back.

I do not fucking like Discourse.

It's rude, it's demanding, it's presumptuous, it's self-centered.

Discourse gentrifies communication.