As I and LostintheCycle pointed out in the Why is Microsoft trying to shoehorn us into Windows 11? thread, there has been a vibe shift on Agora Road. It is not uncommon for threads to devolve into flame wars and debate about unrelated subjects. I think we all noticed a surge of new accounts recently.
I joined the forum on August 2022 and can confidently says that there has been a decline in post quality recentlty. Reading the forum rules make it clears that IlluminatiPirate do not particularly care to police "heated discussions". While I do make use of the blocking function extensively, I must admits that it feels a bit disheartening opening a thread and seeing nearly an entire page of blocked arguments.
From what I can see, its like 3 newbies constantly arguing with eachothers (though a certain old member also like to be argumentative). As such the old axiom of "don't feed the trolls" cannot be used as the "trolls" are feeding each others.
If I were the admin of this place, I would just ban this account, but I think we can all can all agree that a rule to ban "toxic behavior" would be a slippery slope.
Now I consider InsufferableCynic to be the gold standard for what an Agora Rod user should be. Here's an example of one of his post:
This is a well written post where he details his opinion in details. When I think about Agora Road, I always think this Moe gif alongside his posts.
Considering the problematic posts tend to be low efforts, I suggest enforcing a miniumum of 181 words per forum posts/replies. That number is from the first 4 paragraphs of the above post. Now I don't think this would fix everything, but I think it would greatly reduce the surge of low-efforts post.
I joined the forum on August 2022 and can confidently says that there has been a decline in post quality recentlty. Reading the forum rules make it clears that IlluminatiPirate do not particularly care to police "heated discussions". While I do make use of the blocking function extensively, I must admits that it feels a bit disheartening opening a thread and seeing nearly an entire page of blocked arguments.
From what I can see, its like 3 newbies constantly arguing with eachothers (though a certain old member also like to be argumentative). As such the old axiom of "don't feed the trolls" cannot be used as the "trolls" are feeding each others.
If I were the admin of this place, I would just ban this account, but I think we can all can all agree that a rule to ban "toxic behavior" would be a slippery slope.
Now I consider InsufferableCynic to be the gold standard for what an Agora Rod user should be. Here's an example of one of his post:
My position on this goes a step further, as I feel like people are so ingrained in this thought process that they EXPECT software to be both immensely powerful AND easy to use, which is impossible. Everything is always expected to be easy to use, no matter what, with no acceptable reason for it not to be, which hurts complexity.
There is no room within the industry for power tools, which is why FOSS so often has to take up that mantle.
This is why I say that the "it should be intuitive" mindset isn't just an opposing opinion, it's actively harmful to software as a whole. It sets expectations that things should just "be easy" regardless of the opportunity costs of doing so, and if something isn't easy to use for whatever reason, it's not considered a viable trade off, it's simply considered broken or badly designed.
Without unintuitive open source software doing the real work the entire industry would grind to a halt when everyone realises that their simple GUI-based editor with 5 buttons doesn't actually do anything useful.
But don't get me started on web design. That's a whole part of the industry that really, really sucks for a multitude of reasons, and is bringing the rest of the software industry down with it. The design philosophy of web apps are the reason why software is so horrendously bad now, as regular software adopted the web app mindset and very quickly fucked itself. That's not to be meant as a direct attack on you though, I'm sure you just do your job and don't write the standards and expectations for web projects industry-wide.
Also, expecting grandma to use vim is really not that far fetched. Secretaries in the 1980s were capable of using MS-DOS to format floppy disks. It was a standard part of their job. My computer illiterate mother was expected to completely maintain an entire filesystem for her boss, and at the time this was not considered a technical job, it was just normal. Nowadays programmers and computer experts are afraid to use the command line. If grandma was writing enough content to justify learning vim, it would absolutely be worth it, and it's absolutely something most grandparents would be able to master with some practice. The real issue is that most old people barely use their computers enough to really bother learning anything about how to use them, maybe they boot them up once a week to check emails. Taking the time to learn vim doesn't really make sense in that context. It's not like most other people who don't take the time to learn things and as a result end up wasting a bunch of their time later being unable to do what they need, which seems to be the typical smartphone experience for normies. I constantly see people being endlessly frustrated at their phones for doing stupid shit or updating without their consent or changing everything, and spending the 10 minutes to install F-Droid would go a long way to improving their phone experience. But they prefer the misery they know.
This is a well written post where he details his opinion in details. When I think about Agora Road, I always think this Moe gif alongside his posts.
Considering the problematic posts tend to be low efforts, I suggest enforcing a miniumum of 181 words per forum posts/replies. That number is from the first 4 paragraphs of the above post. Now I don't think this would fix everything, but I think it would greatly reduce the surge of low-efforts post.