here's me being grateful for “old school” forums and the slower communities

after years of lurking on the kakoune user forums, i posted there for the first time. i requested feedback on my blog post from a week-ish ago. typically, the kakoune user forums get between one and three new topics posted per month. there are “only” a handful of forum regulars, and then, a larger handful of irregulars.

i ended up getting a meaningful amount of thoughtful, non-toxic feedback on my blog post. it caused me to go back and make the blog post even better. people read and responded to my blog post on their own schedule. and i took my time reading their responses and replying to them.

despite the web forum audience being “smaller,” i can’t help but feel like if i had tried to get feedback in the #kakoune irc channel or the discord server, i would have received a) more immediate responses, but b) lower quality responses, and c) fewer responses. i might not have learned anything. worse, i might have been dissuaded from ever asking for feedback again.

an aside: i don’t have time to dig into this right now, but… is there a good word for whatever the reddit, the fediverse, twitter, and so on, are in this context? semi-synchronous? the visibility/half-life of a thread is much shorter than that of a mailing list or a web forum. well, what i’m trying to say is: if i had posted on mastodon, i’d guess that the responses would have also been a) more immediate, b) of lower quality, and c) fewer.

anyway, i’m grateful web forums still exist despite all of the platforms trying to kill them.¹ the slow drip of asynchronous communication between subject matter experts is probably almost always better than the general purpose firehose feeds where a subset a subject matter experts may or may not be present at a given moment.