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From: Alex Kozhevnikov <alexkoz@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 04:08:20 +0000
Message-ID: <CANxDeMjuGYX=oS4uiPoOgtCjp_4XS92teOSSULqWnHjcsVj3VA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Please, support proposal for a Lojban StackExchange site
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Been lurking here for about two years since my last post, but this
just had to be replied to.

StackExchange is _the_ Q&A site - anyone who's interested in the
growth of Lojban should seriously explore/grok StackExchange,
preferably on a sub-site for a subject which interests them, before
dismissing this, because it would definitely help that cause.

Look, I'm 25, and I've been comfortable with email and email lists
like this for a long time. But for the majority of my age-peers, email
itself is this tertiary, neglected communication medium that they're
not exactly eager to use for regular communication. And email
distribution lists like this one? Of everyone I personally know, _no
one_ would chose a mailing list over StackExchange as a medium for
asking question in the pursuit of learning a new language. Here's an
example: I just tried asking my partner which she would prefer: she
doesn't really like or frequent StackExchange - but it took a good 20
minutes before she even understood what this kind of mailing list is,
let alone why anyone would want such a thing. I'm willing to blame
about half of that on me starting out with the assumption that she
knew/remembered what it was and thus not zeroing in on how to explain
it quickly enough, but it's illustrative. Mailing lists list this are
_alien_ to the population cohort that's taking over now. StackExchange
isn't a common household name like facebook yet, but it's not foreign
either.

karis: In terms of awareness/visibility, the current options are to
StackExchange like a candle is to a star. In terms of leaving a useful
record for the future, there's no real comparison. There are other
issues: because I often don't have time to read every lojban mailing
list email, I end up tuning them all out: that effect doesn't happen
with a StackExchange, because it's not a stream into your inbox, it's
a directory of questions with relevant answers, indexed by topic and
sorted by quality (as collectively determined by the masses). The real
question is how will the newcomers to the StackExchange discover this
mailing list, which I think _does_ offer value that a StackExchange
doesn't.

When I first joined this mailing list a few years ago, I asked if
dotside was widely accepted/used. I asked a question about signing
names and the exact arguments in favor of the slightly different ways
that I saw people signing their names. If I ever knew how to
find/search publicly available archives for this mailing list for
those questions, I don't remember how to do so now. Nor ever seen it
show up in a search engine query about it: but I do know that if there
was a lojban.stackexchange.com, it would be trivial to search for, it
would almost certainly start to show up on the first page of search
results for relevant keywords, and it would even be automatically
suggested to someone who starts typing up a similar question on the
site. A new StackExchange site will have vastly more exposure than
this mailing list, simply by sheer volume of traffic already going
there, the fact that it already has communities interested in both
natlangs and conlangs to whom mailing lists are about as
accessible/comfortable as floppy disks and cassette tapes, the fact
that popular questions get recommended/linked across all StackExchange
sites, and search-engine exposure (the vast majority of the time if
I'm looking for information about something that there's a
StackExchange site for, the StackExchange results show up first - the
only exceptions I can think of are obscure open-source technical
discussions, where very well established mailing lists with well-known
highly-ranked-in-search-engines web-accessible archives occasionally
still win out, sometimes.

gejyspa: It was after two (moderately long) sentences. That you missed
it suggests to me a serious bias against allocating another second or
two to genuinely properly evaluate the new thing being presented to
you, and/or towards dismissing it out-of-hand. And honestly, that you
think your 30+ years is an argument for its obscurity is
eyebrow-raising to me. Accumulating experience naturally means you'd
have less reason to seek out something like StackExchange than a new
software developer. And if you've had decades to develop a skillset
for acquiring knowledge in the absence of a resource like
StackOverflow/StackExchange, that would clearly reduce the likelihood
of finding it after it did appear: if you answer your questions by
reading the documentation/manpages, testing it out, reading through
the source-code and/or disassembly, stepping through with a debugger,
or asking another coworker, etc, and are comfortable enough navigating
that set of options, there's no reason why you'd ever find it.
Meanwhile the modern youth type their questions in a search engine in
obtusely natural-language sentences, and hope for the best. Which,
with the growth of things like StackExchange, has gradually become an
actually viable strategy.

Regards,
mu'o mi'e la .a,lekSANdr.koJEVni,kov. do'u

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