[python-committers] [OT] email clients

[Donald Stufft]

> On Nov 3, 2018, at 3:04 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> 
> On 11/03/2018 11:45 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
>> I would agree *if* that was the only axis that the two tools differed on.
> 
> It's enough for me.  My participation on Discourse is going to be so low you might think I went emeritus. :/
> 
>> (Un)fortunately there is a laundry list of improvements over the traditional mailing list
> 
> Which are all irrelevant if we don't use the tool itself.  It's like my wife wanting to reduce my sodium intake by buying reduced-sodium peanut butter -- it worked!  I don't eat that peanut butter.  ;)
> 


I’m the other way. I basically don’t participate in python-dev or python-ideas anymore because of the issues mailing lists have. At best I occasionally peek at them, but I even do that so rarely any more because even when I find something I want to participate in, knowing how painful participation is going to be is enough to make me decide not to typically.

There’s also a bit of a confirmation bias here of course. The people who would have otherwise contributed to discussion but decided not to because the UI afforded provided by mailing lists are bad enough for them personally to not make it worth it, are unlikely going to be here discussion their preferences. So we’re a self selected group who are at least willing to tolerate mailing lists to some degree, but there’s a reasonable chance that we’re excluding otherwise valuable contributors who simply don’t want to deal with mailing lists.

I would posit that pretty much any choice we make here, including *not* making a choice is going to exclude some subset of population— even the population of people currently “here”. Thus the big question is which options are going to lose the fewest people and (ideally) contribute the least to burn out. I know for me personally, the python mailing lists are a non trivial amount of the source of burn out for me, and the only way I’ve managed to stay active in the community at all is by ignoring as many of our communities mailing lists as possible.