The only LW-specific community feature my proposal takes advantage of is our cultural applause of “I cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemmas.” [...] It scales in the specific sense that it allows for incoming users and authors to be added incrementally.
New users, who encounter inbound links on other sites, aren’t yet invested enough in the community to join an NNTP network. This isn’t a PD type problem, since “cooperation” here requires investment that only pays off later (if at all): spending time choosing, installing, and learning to use a new client application, usually without understanding why a non-web solution is being used, let along that particular solution.
This is one I’m glad someone asked about because I thought it was clear and it wasn’t: I am not advocating a native-client-only approach. I am aiming for something that uses NNTP as mechanism on the back end, so invested users have better options than “bug the 1.5 guys in a position to fix things to fix things” and interoperability between LW and the diaspora is easy rather than hard.
Inbound users should not have to know or care that NNTP is involved (1.7), for exactly the reason you mention: to the average user, the web is the internet (1.1, first because I expect most people here don’t realize it either), and explaining to them why they are wrong is not helpful. I want the answer to the eventual, inevitable question “how do I do X” (where X is not some fundamental operation like “read” or “post”) to be “install this app today and be happy,” as opposed to “bug person Y for six months and hope they take the time to implement X.”
The ‘cooperate’ action I need has to come from diaspora authors, not inbound new users; they are the ones that would need to be convinced to join the network and use blog software that supports it. Making that cooperate action as close to costless as possible (I would settle for “no harder than setting up your own blog”) is a hard problem—but, I believe, solvable.
Thanks for making that clear. I can’t foresee what your argument for NNTP on the backend is going to be, so I’m interested in reading your further posts on it.
New users, who encounter inbound links on other sites, aren’t yet invested enough in the community to join an NNTP network. This isn’t a PD type problem, since “cooperation” here requires investment that only pays off later (if at all): spending time choosing, installing, and learning to use a new client application, usually without understanding why a non-web solution is being used, let along that particular solution.
This is one I’m glad someone asked about because I thought it was clear and it wasn’t: I am not advocating a native-client-only approach. I am aiming for something that uses NNTP as mechanism on the back end, so invested users have better options than “bug the 1.5 guys in a position to fix things to fix things” and interoperability between LW and the diaspora is easy rather than hard.
Inbound users should not have to know or care that NNTP is involved (1.7), for exactly the reason you mention: to the average user, the web is the internet (1.1, first because I expect most people here don’t realize it either), and explaining to them why they are wrong is not helpful. I want the answer to the eventual, inevitable question “how do I do X” (where X is not some fundamental operation like “read” or “post”) to be “install this app today and be happy,” as opposed to “bug person Y for six months and hope they take the time to implement X.”
The ‘cooperate’ action I need has to come from diaspora authors, not inbound new users; they are the ones that would need to be convinced to join the network and use blog software that supports it. Making that cooperate action as close to costless as possible (I would settle for “no harder than setting up your own blog”) is a hard problem—but, I believe, solvable.
Thanks for making that clear. I can’t foresee what your argument for NNTP on the backend is going to be, so I’m interested in reading your further posts on it.
I appreciate both your encouragement and your criticism.