On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 11:41 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Something that that would be useful is a video demonstration of Flow in action.
That could be handy, Pine. But sometimes you can't demonstrate all benefits yet, because they don't even exist in the implementation yet -- only in the foundations of an architecture. And sometimes you can show the idea of a benefit, but people will look at the current implementation and hate some aspect of it, and fail to imagine a version of it that would be beneficial.
To give an example of the latter, Flow already has the ability to give thread-level notifications of responses. But the first implementation of notifications was very spammy (generated too many notifications), so people who looked at it said "I don't see the benefit! It's just spammy!". Love em or hate em, sites like Facebook spend years tweaking the algorithm for every one of their features (newsfeed, notifications, etc.) to get the best results from their perspective. It takes time to get this right -- and the initial reaction may often be "No, this sucks" because, well, it's not quite right yet.
Fundamentally, I'd ask people to relax a bit regarding Flow. Nobody's planning to push this one out radically. Today we saw some on-wiki drama because a new test page was turned on. For something like the en.wp Teahouse, I'd want the hosts to be fully on-board before converting it over (and the rest of the community to not oppose it). If that's not doable, we can focus on other use cases first. It's early days and this one's a long haul -- just like VE. But we shouldn't shy away from a problem just because it's hard.
Erik