In an earlier Chief Chat, the forum was talked about, and people were encouraged to be here.
Then in a subsequent Chief Chat, there was commentary and comedy on how forums are obsolete. This is false.
Long-form writing is the only way to effectively distill time and intelligence into a concise form. With Discord, there are only useful snippets in a cloud of nonsense. Discord has the same lack of value for complex conversation as Twitter.
If this forum is not valued, then users will go to Reddit. If they're ignored here, they'll be ignored there as well. All that potential will go to waste.
I get when post volume is too high to keep up. I get when developers think they're shit hot and won't bother with their users. I got neither impression from this team.
Roughly, I think some things need to happen for a forum to be made useful to developers:
- Every single post and reply has to be read. Anything potentially useful is honed in on and clarification is asked for if needed. Those posts are categorized then either brutally summarized into a list or noted for followup. More on that later.
- The high level categories are simply "past/present/future", indicating features already-completed, being-developed, and future or unconsidered features. This obviously maps over to bug-reports, feature change-requests, etc.
- The low level categories try to funnel items down into groups of similar items, with deduplication. This evolves over time.
- Developers are regularly presented with a list of small phrases, to which each is responded to with a word or two: yes, no, being considered, undecided, in development, etc. These responses are brutally blunt so they're quick and easy for devs to offer. That language will develop over time.
- A new forum feature will exist so that such helpers can add a small dot to any posts that have been reviewed in this manner. It is annoying as hell to users to think that developers don't care about what they've written to try to improve things. A second dot would indicate something particularly interesting to the helper. It's meant to be very out-of-the-way and not obvious and interactive like a developer reply.
"But who in their right mind would read every post?" You'd be surprised. The effort could be broken up as needed, with a private back-end marker indicating that a particular person has claimed a thread. Right now, a single person could do all of it.
I could do all of it.
Without long-form discussion, all you'll have is unmanageable zero-attention-spam commentary on Discord.
Value long-form, because some people only work that way, and some people work best that way. Don't discard potential value.
Then in a subsequent Chief Chat, there was commentary and comedy on how forums are obsolete. This is false.
Long-form writing is the only way to effectively distill time and intelligence into a concise form. With Discord, there are only useful snippets in a cloud of nonsense. Discord has the same lack of value for complex conversation as Twitter.
If this forum is not valued, then users will go to Reddit. If they're ignored here, they'll be ignored there as well. All that potential will go to waste.
I get when post volume is too high to keep up. I get when developers think they're shit hot and won't bother with their users. I got neither impression from this team.
Roughly, I think some things need to happen for a forum to be made useful to developers:
- Every single post and reply has to be read. Anything potentially useful is honed in on and clarification is asked for if needed. Those posts are categorized then either brutally summarized into a list or noted for followup. More on that later.
- The high level categories are simply "past/present/future", indicating features already-completed, being-developed, and future or unconsidered features. This obviously maps over to bug-reports, feature change-requests, etc.
- The low level categories try to funnel items down into groups of similar items, with deduplication. This evolves over time.
- Developers are regularly presented with a list of small phrases, to which each is responded to with a word or two: yes, no, being considered, undecided, in development, etc. These responses are brutally blunt so they're quick and easy for devs to offer. That language will develop over time.
- A new forum feature will exist so that such helpers can add a small dot to any posts that have been reviewed in this manner. It is annoying as hell to users to think that developers don't care about what they've written to try to improve things. A second dot would indicate something particularly interesting to the helper. It's meant to be very out-of-the-way and not obvious and interactive like a developer reply.
"But who in their right mind would read every post?" You'd be surprised. The effort could be broken up as needed, with a private back-end marker indicating that a particular person has claimed a thread. Right now, a single person could do all of it.
I could do all of it.
Without long-form discussion, all you'll have is unmanageable zero-attention-spam commentary on Discord.
Value long-form, because some people only work that way, and some people work best that way. Don't discard potential value.
