Werd I/O

This post by Bill Mills about power and communication in open source is great:

Being belittled and threatened and told to shut up as a matter of course when growing up is the experience of many; and it does not correlate to programming ability at all. It is not enough to simply not be overtly rude to contributors; the tone was set by someone else long before your first commit. What are we losing by hearing only the brash?

Bottom line: if you, either as a maintainer or as a community, are telling people to shut up then you're not open at all.

If you make opaque demands of people to test their legitimacy before participating then you're not open at all.

If you require that only certain kinds of people participate then you're not open at all.

The potential of open source is, much like the web, that anyone can participate. On Known, we're really keen to embrace not just developers, but designers, writers, QA testers - anyone who wants to chip in and create great software with us. That's not going to happen if we're unfriendly or project the vibe that only certain kinds of people can play. Donating time and resources on an open project is a very generous act, that not everyone can participate in. Frankly, as a community we should be grateful that anyone wants to take part.

As a project founder, a lot of that is about leading by example. That means being talkative and open. I get a lot of direct messages and emails from people, and I try and direct people to participate in the IRC channel and the mailing list - not just because it allows our conversations to be findable if people in the future have similar questions, but because every single message adds to the positive feedback loop. If there's public conversation going on, and it's friendly, then hopefully more people will feel comfortable taking part in it.

Like any positive communication, a lot of this is related to empathy. I'm pretty shy: what would make me feel welcome to participate in a community? Probably not abrupt messages, terse technical corrections or (as we see in many communities) name-calling. Further to that, explicitly marking the community as a safe space is important. We're one of the few communities to have an anti-harassment policy; I'm pleased to say that we've never had to invoke it. More communities should do this.

Which isn't to say that there isn't more that we can do. There is: we need better documentation, better user discussion spaces, a better showcase for people to show off what they've built on top of Known. We're working on it, but let us know what you think.

And please! Whether you're a writer, designer, illustrator, eager user, or a developer, we'd love for you to get involved.

1. Twitter - by far the social network that I use the most - is struggling to break 300 million monthly active users and is not hitting revenue targets. (Contrast with Facebook's 1.44 billion monthly actives.) Even investor Chris Sacca has warned that he's going to start making "suggestions".
2. Instagram - still a newcomer in many peoples' eyes - is beginning to send re-engagement emails in response to flagging user growth.
3. The 2016 US election is apparently going to be huge on Snapchat. Translation: Snapchat is over. The next generation of young users are already looking for something else. Snapchat was released in September 2011.
4. The Document Object Model - core to how web pages are manipulated inside the browser - is slow, and may never catch up to native apps. We've known that responsiveness matters for engagement for over a decade.
5. It's possible to build more responsive web apps by going around the DOM. But these JavaScript-based web apps are harder to parse and often can't be seen by search engines (unless you provide a fallback, which requires a lot of extra programming time).
6. Push notifications - which are core to apps like Snapchat, and possibly the future of Internet applications - are not available on the open web. Browsers like Chrome are implementing them on a browser-by-browser basis.
7. Facebook has no HTML fallbacks, renders almost entirely in JavaScript and lives off push notifications. Twitter has HTML fallbacks, is very standards-based, uses push notifications but also SMS and email, and is generally a good player (with respect to the web, at least, although it's less good at important features like abuse management). Facebook is kicking Twitter's ass.
8. The thing that may save Twitter? Periscope, a native live video app, which is highly responsive and live-video-heavy.
9. Users have stopped paying for apps, and instead opt for free apps that have in-app purchases, so they can try before they buy. We're a long way off having a payments standard for the web.
10. There's no way to transcode video in a web browser, which means uploading video via the web is effectively impossible on most mobile connections. (Who wants to sit and wait for a 1GB file to upload, even on an LTE connection?) Meanwhile, the web audio API saves WAV files, rather than some other, more highly-compressed formats you may have heard of. Similarly, resampling images is difficult. In other words, while the web has been optimized for consumption (albeit in a slower way than native apps, as we've seen), it has a long way to go when it comes to letting people produce content, particularly from mobile devices.

What does all of this mean?

I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I think it's important to understand where users are at. The people making the web aren't always the people using it, and there's a serious danger that we find ourselves trying to remake the platform we all enjoyed when we first discovered it.

Instead, we need to make something new, and understand that if we're building applications to serve people, the experience is more important to our users than our principles.

All of these things can be solved. But while we're solving them at length, native app developers are going off and building experiences that may become the future of the Internet.