Clojurians Log v2

Happy new year everyone! I have enjoyed this 2019 at Clojurians, interacting reciprocally with the community. #announcements has been particularly cool but I have to say it's losing a bit of its shine, isn't it? In some cases, probably if one counted, he would perceive e.g. 20 updates in 2019 for the same library. It that library happened to not be particularly fit for my current needs, then I'd feel saturated with irrelevant info. That's just for 1 library, but the effect compounds with more authors, more libraries. To be honest I don't feel anything negative towards that work - it's simply info that decreases the overall engagement for the channel. Relatedly, I figured out that people can hit  /feed <https://github.com/user/repo/releases.atom> in their Slack, provided they have the RSS integration installed (which is official). Accordingly, perhaps we could start the year with some sort of "decorum" guidelines for the channel? A tentative example: - Only announce new libraries, or a few major/critical releases a year (e.g. 4 #announcements posts per lib and year) - If you are interested in keeping your audience engaged, consider updating your project's README pointing out how to keep up (e.g. here's my twitter, our company eng blog, use this RSS feed) - Avoid overlap with #news-and-articles - sometimes tweets, blog posts or such are posted to #announcements. I don't think the focus of #announcements should be "reach as many eyeballs as possible" - this channel has worked pretty well since we created it Let me know what you think!

Another nit is when people paste just a link, without release info listing what's new. Honestly that seems just abusive of our attention span ("here's a random release number and a link"), for lack of a better term

Some folks do start threads on blog posts etc in #announcements directing people to #news-and-articles instead, and I would encourage anyone who feels such posts do not belong in #announcements to do the same (be nice, use a thread). #announcements is supposed to be for library announcements (only) and it says so right in the topic.

@borkdude has been particularly prolific in the latter part of this year so I'm tagging him here so he sees your message @vemv and can respond to it if he wishes -- since it seems like you are calling him out for the "saturation" caused by "20 updates in 2019 for the same library"? 🙂

(personally, I like seeing all the progress on his broad array of command-line tools, even tho' I don't use any of them myself -- except for the recent deps.clj on Windows -- and so I wouldn't want to join any of his tool-specific channels here nor seek out the RSS feed or repeatedly peek at any of the readmes)

You're right in that I had his updates in mind, although it's nothing personal, and also I certainly remember a few other authors posting updates in a grey zone (i.e. making me wonder "is this a truthful informative update, or an attempt at marketing by repetition?") I like Michiel's work, and in my workplace a peer and me actively work in integrating it, extending it, etc. Perhaps over the years GraalVM will be a big factor in the :clj: scene, and of course he will be a pioneer to feel thankful to. At the same time, there's a difference between being informed of new projects / major updates, and being informed of tiny improvements. The latest update in accouncements (`Added http://java.net.Socket and http://java.net.ServerSocket to babashka now`) corresponds essentially to 1 tiny commit extending a manifest file https://github.com/borkdude/babashka/commit/a9ac2cabbef471e098d09d69e8d7f0898f30038d . Quite obviously, updates that amount to per-commit resolution cannot scale across a community (e.g. if everyone did it, #announcements would be 100% irrelevant)

In the end I look forward to an improvement in "updates resolution", e.g. 4 updates instead of 20 per year. Nothing personal, or discouraging

btw I like Alex Miller's blog in that it groups tiny updates that might be otherwise not particularly suitable to share individually (of course that's just one way, as RSS is another)

@vemv I think I read the rules for the #announcements channel: announcements regarding lib updates and a link where to follow up (or some reactions in a thread), not flooding the channel with anything else. That's exactly what I've been doing. If there are clearer rules about what is and what is not allowed there and guidelines about frequency, I'd be happy to follow them. As far as I can tell, I've kept my updates short and to the point. I tend to release often, but don't even mention every release in that channel.

Usually I only post new projects to Reddit and such. I use media like Twitter and Slack for more frequent updates. I've almost never posted to the Clojure mailing group.

Hey @borkdude thanks for the response. The intent of my message is proposing some rules for new #announcements activity; and not denouncing any specific behavior, particularly when seemingly there weren't specific rules to begin with (other than the channel description). I don't assume malice or anything similar; I just want to point out where #announcements is now (IMO: somewhat worse than 1 year ago), and where it could be tomorrow if we react on time.

It could also die out because of inactivity 😉

Considering that the Slack history is no longer than a week and the frequency of new libs isn't that high

I'd invite you to try putting yourself in the shoes of people who don't happen to use your array of tools at this specific moment And yet could see a handful related updates per week... sometimes with per-commit resolution Wouldn't you end up muting / deprioritizing the channel? Not particularly fair for the other people (practitioners, newcomers) who post more occasionally tldr diversity, scarcity tend to be good. A constant stream with fewer themes tends to tire people - has happened in many apps/communities/...

I can see what you mean. I've now deleted all the posts about non-new projects for the last month.

I think I'll not post to the channel in 2020 for non-new projects. People know where to find me if they're interested in smaller updates. It's fine with me.

Kudos 🍻 Reiterating, this is nothing personal so I'd be happy if some rules arose from this discussion

In Zulip there are topics per channel to which you can un(sub)scribe (which could in this case be libraries). But this is not Zulip.

Another idea could be to make a #new-libs (low traffic) channel and #lib-updates (unbounded traffic) channel so people can choose what they want to follow

as "announcements" is a very general concept

so to decomplect the announcements channel basically 😉

We don't want to auto-join newcomers to a vast array of channels -- and adding new channels for parts of what #announcements is currently for means losing the critical mass of 10,536 members so we don't want to do that either.

Given how quickly we "lose" history in #announcements due to the 10,000 message cap on free plans, I would propose just not announcing additional releases of a library while the history still has announcements for that library -- unless it is a major new release or an important bug fix.

Currently, #announcements history goes back to November 7th so that's not-quite-two-months. One or perhaps two announcements for a given library in that period seems acceptable...?

What can also be done is group additional releases in a thread. I've also been doing that sometimes, although not as much as @vemv would like it 😛

Yup, also a good proposal.

I've seen other channels in which the history was only a week, does that differ per channel?

Given how long this Slack has been going, we haven't had to "police" #announcements much so far and that's encouraging 🙂

Yeah, I think low-traffic channels keep a longer history.

#beginners only goes back to December 18th, for example.

OK, doing only one announcement every two months for the same project (or how long the history is going) and group in thread when more is needed sounds reasonable to me. People can unsubscribe from threads, so that also makes sense from the "Zulip" perspective.

I'll make that my new 2020 resolution then

Btw, is the Zulip active compared to this Slack?

In interactive conversations, it is very light compared to Slack. In copies of messages that appear on Slack, it is nearly as active as Slack 🙂

I like your mathematical correctness as always 🙂

i.e. it is light in interactive conversations that people originate on ZulipChat, not on Slack.

It's a shame that no critical mass of folks from this Slack have ever gravitated to any of the other communities that various people have set up over the years... A lot of options have been tried. Zulip looked the most promising based on the number of members who signed up in the first few months but it's gone pretty quiet now.

Clojurians Zulip members over time

There are 1,184 users as of late December.

(of which only about 100 are "active" users of Zulip)

@seancorfield Would it be good to write down this new rule for the #announcements channel in the topic for that channel? Do other people have to agree first?

Feel free to update the channel description, under Details. The topic is too short to contain much in the way of rules.

@vemv since you brought this up, I'll leave you the honors to do it

The description currently says

For community members to make announcements about projects, libraries, and other things that might be of interest to the Clojure community. Follow-up discussions should happen elsewhere!

We might want to lose "and other things", and put in a pointer to #news-and-articles for blog posts etc.

Traffic comparison: green is the mirror bot from Slack; dark blue are actual messages sent on Zulip

> Currently, #announcements history goes back to November 7th so that’s not-quite-two-months. One or perhaps two announcements for a given library in that period seems acceptable...? This seems to be a device-specific history. At desktop I see #announcements oldest message is from Dec 3rd, at mobile it’s Dec 19th.

I was surprised it was as long as even a few weeks, given how much traffic we get here... It doesn't particularly surprise me that it's different for "everyone" tho'. I mean, Because. Slack.

Zulip messages has seen quite an uptake since November. Mostly it seems due to traffic at the data-science-stream, more private messages it seems as well:

indeed. Viewing a new channel shows only about a week of history.

the announcements-stream at Zulip (and their API) allows for some nice stats btw. Number of announcements (at Slack-channel, ignoring any followup messages in a thread) per month:

$ jq '.messages | map(.timestamp as $ts | (.ts |= ($ts | gmtime | del(.[2,3,4,5,6,7]) | .[1] += 1))) | map(select(.subject == "announcements@slack")) | group_by(.ts) | map([(first | .ts | join("-")), length])' announce.json
[
  [
    "2019-2",
    49
  ],
  [
    "2019-3",
    62
  ],
  [
    "2019-4",
    56
  ],
  [
    "2019-5",
    59
  ],
  [
    "2019-6",
    64
  ],
  [
    "2019-7",
    77
  ],
  [
    "2019-8",
    55
  ],
  [
    "2019-9",
    65
  ],
  [
    "2019-10",
    75
  ],
  [
    "2019-11",
    48
  ],
  [
    "2019-12",
    66
  ]
]

thanks for the progress on the discussion. sounding good to me! I'll try to open a PR against https://github.com/clojurians/community-development which can be refined and then linked to from the #announcements description