Jon Ericson
TaggartI see it's once again time to post this: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives
Jon Ericson
- 91 Followers
- 51 Following
- 129 Posts
Communities Manager at the OpenSSL Foundation.
The big deal for OpenSSL 4.0 is that it will remove features. This is always a risk for low-level libraries because it means people might see build failures with the latest version and just give up on upgrading. But extra complexity, especially for software designed to secure data and network connections, comes at a cost. Removing code that ought not be used anymore is a feature.
The video from my @fosdem talk, How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed, is now up! I had a great time presenting it and the questions I got in the session were interesting. Happy to answer (or at least ponder) and questions you might have here.
Strange what brings me out of lurk mode: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434509/can-we-not-do-over-a-year-ago-please/438041#438041
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/115852927913242505
One eye-opening thing I discovered when I started working at Stack Overflow was how many junk questions were filtered out automatically by the software. Then even more questions are rejected by the community. Finally questions are just left unanswered, which might be the most discouraging thing of all. The "Optimizing for pearls" philosophy suggests that aggressive filtering of questions encourages great answers.
And yet, when answer rates started to fall off there didn't seem to be much concern either in the community or at the company. Ultimately the culture of Stack Overflow assumed questions would continue flooding in. Now they are not and that means fewer great answers.
I wonder if you've had a look at the Staging Ground.
@codinghorror @geistesgift As far back as 2015 people were concerned with the drop off in question growth. I wasn't worried except for a corresponding decrease in answer rate. Asking questions has been less rewarding over time (both in terms of getting answers and getting reputation), which is a trend that was accelerated when people were able to avoid interacting with Stack Overflow itself by asking an LLM. The basic approach to dealing with the unmanageable flood of questions was aggressive culling. That's a great strategy as long as the flood continues, but it's pointless now that people aren't even bothering. The missed opportunity was to build pathways to help people ask better questions.
I'm going to speak at FOSDEM about how the biggest disaster to hit OpenSSL revived the community. We don't wish for calamity but it often clarifies latent problems in a system.
@lizardbill I wish I understood the impulse to make comments more visible and less useful at the same time.
(I wish I could have gotten more traction on my idea to hide trivial comments. C'est la vie!)
It appears my favorite source for the shrug emoticon has gone out of business. (See the Wayback Machine for it's full glory.) I'm proud to offer my cheap knockoff alternative: https://jlericson.com/shrug