While discussing secret ballots over on debian-vote, we got a little off
topic and started discussing the value of a mechanism to express agreement/disagreement with messages in a mailing list thread.

"Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

Russ> Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes:
>> The bit that was supposed to be the conclusion of that was that
>> it might be good if we had some mechanism for collecting opinions
>> related to mailing-list mails/threads that was private, and
>> didn't involve making (often already long) mailing list threads
>> longer in order to express an opinion, but I think that's going
>> OT so should be discussed elsewhere, probably after setting up a
>> prototype.

Russ> For the record, I like this, and in general I think there are
Russ> multiple areas of Debian where we could benefit from being
Russ> able to take a quick pulse of the mood of affected
Russ> contributors without relying solely on what people are willing
Russ> to write in (sometimes contentious) email threads.

Neil did set up a prototype of Discorse a while back. It has good
facilities for this kind of informal polling as well as good facilities
for rearranging threads and that kind of thing. It's a bit different
than our mailing list culture.

If I wanted to run such an informal poll today, I'd set up a salsa issue
for the discussion or at least for the parts where I wanted to get
thumbs up/down to various statements.

I too think that such informal mechanisms would be valuable.

--Sam

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On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 10:02:13AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

I would hope to have a way of responding to any mail in our mailing
lists, preferably via something that I could bind to a keystroke in my
mail reader, without needing anyone to set up a poll in advance.

I'd expect the service to keep a tally, but keep the identities of
voters secret. I'd also restrict the right to vote (with criteria
depending on the mailing list) to avoid people making up IDs to skew
votes, or random passers-by voting because they found a link somewhere.

With such a service, one could gather opinions simply by saying "Please respond to this mail via the thumbs-o-matic" and have an instant poll
with no effort.

Also, if someone started a divisive GR discussion, instead of it
immediately starting a flame war, it might instead mostly provoke a big thumbs down on the thumbs-o-matic, and one of the responses to the
discussion could simply mention that fact, pointing at an automatically generated graph. That would then give the proposer the chance to
encourage their claimed silent majority to see if they can push the
figures into the positive, and if not, one could hope that the proposer
would have the sense to give up early.

I could also imagine setting up my mail program to query the
thumbs-o-matic to help it decide how to sort or present my mail.

You described Reddit, just with some very complicated integration with
your mail client.

--
WBR, wRAR

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Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:

While discussing secret ballots over on debian-vote, we got a little off topic and started discussing the value of a mechanism to express agreement/disagreement with messages in a mailing list thread.

"Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

Russ> Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes:
>> The bit that was supposed to be the conclusion of that was that
>> it might be good if we had some mechanism for collecting opinions
>> related to mailing-list mails/threads that was private, and
>> didn't involve making (often already long) mailing list threads
>> longer in order to express an opinion, but I think that's going
>> OT so should be discussed elsewhere, probably after setting up a
>> prototype.

Russ> For the record, I like this, and in general I think there are
Russ> multiple areas of Debian where we could benefit from being
Russ> able to take a quick pulse of the mood of affected
Russ> contributors without relying solely on what people are willing
Russ> to write in (sometimes contentious) email threads.

Neil did set up a prototype of Discorse a while back. It has good
facilities for this kind of informal polling as well as good facilities
for rearranging threads and that kind of thing. It's a bit different
than our mailing list culture.

If I wanted to run such an informal poll today, I'd set up a salsa issue
for the discussion or at least for the parts where I wanted to get
thumbs up/down to various statements.

I too think that such informal mechanisms would be valuable.

What I had in mind was something rather different from that, I think.

I would hope to have a way of responding to any mail in our mailing
lists, preferably via something that I could bind to a keystroke in my
mail reader, without needing anyone to set up a poll in advance.

I'd expect the service to keep a tally, but keep the identities of
voters secret. I'd also restrict the right to vote (with criteria
depending on the mailing list) to avoid people making up IDs to skew
votes, or random passers-by voting because they found a link somewhere.

With such a service, one could gather opinions simply by saying "Please
respond to this mail via the thumbs-o-matic" and have an instant poll
with no effort.

Also, if someone started a divisive GR discussion, instead of it
immediately starting a flame war, it might instead mostly provoke a big
thumbs down on the thumbs-o-matic, and one of the responses to the
discussion could simply mention that fact, pointing at an automatically generated graph. That would then give the proposer the chance to
encourage their claimed silent majority to see if they can push the
figures into the positive, and if not, one could hope that the proposer
would have the sense to give up early.

I could also imagine setting up my mail program to query the
thumbs-o-matic to help it decide how to sort or present my mail.
If a lot of people adopted demoting unpopular threads in that way,
fewer people would be drawn into some of our more pointless discussions
because they'd be more likely to skip reading them, before becoming upset.

People might not feel quite as strong an urge to tell someone they were
wrong via mail, if the mail they were disagreeing with had some marker indicating to them that it had already been disliked by quite a few
others.

One possible downside of this is that if it were easily possible to
query it for the most unpopular threads in Debian, it may become either
a shopping list, or some sort of badge of honour, for trolls.

Cheers, Phil.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY

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On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 9:26 AM Andrey Rahmatullin <wrar@debian.org> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 10:02:13AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
[..]
You described Reddit, just with some very complicated integration with
your mail client.

Apologies for jumping into this, despite not having time to
participate properly in theconversation.

I would urge folks driving this effort to have a look at Audrey Tang's description of the platform they've been using for country-wide
consensus building in Taiwan.

They have a reddit-like system but _without_ a reply button (nor IIRC
a downvote button). That tiny ux change means that:

- agreeing is effortless (just press upvote button)

- disagreeing requires _constructive_ work (one has to make a new
post, that actually proposes something, rather than merely criticise
somebody else's)

- a controversial post can be ignored, and only if it gathers a
non-trivial number of upvotes one feels the need to do something about
(aka xkcd.com/386)

Their implementation is open-source but I doubt that it'd work for
Debian. We'd need something that integrates with email and gpg
signatures. It could be email in, web out (much like our BTS),
although technically one could also have web in, to accommodate folks
that are more keen on a forum like interface.

Needless to say that this'd take a significant amount of work to
design and develop. Somebody would need to figure out the relation
between email threads and polls (and counter positions in the same
topic).

I don't have time to participate in centi-threads, let alone work on
this, but I'd be happy to review any relevant docs in this direction.

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