OT: Re: Younger generations preferring social media(esque) interactions.

Tue Mar 23 06:22:15 UTC 2021

Hi,

As someone from a "younger generation" (2001) who does use mailing lists,
semi-actively participates in RIPE mailing lists but also created a network
community on Discord, I want to chime in here.

> Are they willing to use a (traditional) forum (of sorts) that is
dedicated to the venue?  Or Are they wanting things to come to them
wherever they happen to be today?  E.g. Facebook group, Discord, Slack, etc?

I haven't ever used facebook beyond receiving some invitation for an event,
and I feel like that's the most common case for people around my age group.
(not using Facebook that is)

(Discord is a chat based thing with a similar UX/UI to Slack)
I have mainly seen Discord, partially as the barrier to entry is very low.

> If it's the latter, does that mean that you have to constantly keep
changing /where/ messages are sent to in order to keep up with the
latest and greatest or at least most popular (in your audience) flavor
of the day / week / month / year social media site?

I see this as a potential issue for sure, and if something like Discord was
to be used, I would want to see it in addition to the mailing list. As I
think the mailing list format works a lot better for some topics.

> Either way, does the target audience that you're talking about actively
go to said site(s) (I want to say watering hole) and poll them?
Or are they using some phone / device app that polls them and puts a
notification over the icon?

I am only going to speak for how Discord works here. Discord uses the
latter or the former depending on how you see it. There are phone apps,
desktop apps, and a web client. The desktop app and the web client are
pretty much the same (some exceptions like keybinds etc).
So you can use the apps to get notifications ir you could just use the Web
UI and look at it whenever you want. (technically it is still pushing
messages to the web client via websockets)

> Part of my struggle is that I fail to see how it scales to poll multiple
sites (or app icon notifications) when there are 10s, 100s, or even more
things to check. [...]

So Discord is usually setup so you only get notifications when you or a
role (tag on a user p much) you belong to gets mentioned (like "@Cynthia
hello world!").
But at least I would imagine that if something like Discord or Slack was to
be used it would be in addition to the mailing list.
Because Discord is proprietary, you can't host your own instance, they do
platform wide bans of people violating the terms.
In addition to features like searching archives being a bit of a mess in
chat systems in general.
In a basic way a Discord guild/server (server is the more common term) can
be seen as a group of IRC channels (similar to Slack).
Sure Discord has other things like voice channels, RBAC, etc. but you can
use it as just a set of IRC channels.

> Any additional insight that you can provide would be appreciated.

As I have mentioned, personally I think if anything it should be in
addition to mailing lists, and also how the barrier to entry is quite low.

I think this is very important to get a new younger generation of people
interested in these topics. (such as myself)

Using a chat system they are already familiar with to ask more casual
questions is a lot easier for some.
Especially if you are thinking of people who are just starting out, some of
which will be part of the next generation of network engineers.

I started getting more interested in these topics (internet backbone
related topics like BGP, RPKI, etc.) around 3 years ago.

I started by talking to other people via Discord who helped me with the
kind of questions that are obvious to me now and I doubt would work as well
in a mailing list format.

In September 2018 I started a community on Discord targeted at networking
specifically (some of the ones I had seen before that were more generic
DC/enterprise hw and server stuff).
It has a bit above 400 member users at this point (some are probably
abandoned at this point though) and frequently has ~200 online (online
means client is open, not that they are looking at this community) users.

I think it does pretty well at supporting the different use cases, like
people who want help trouble shooting something, people who want to discuss
something generic, and people who want to discuss ops topics (more like
nanog).

But it's also quite flexible and allows for creating channels for specific
events or topics such as a RIPE meeting, or more recently fire at OVH SBG.

I am not sure how well I explained things here, so feel free to ask if
something is not clear or anything else. (not just directed to Grant)

-Cynthia

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 16:58 Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> On 3/21/21 8:03 AM, Noah wrote:
> > Well baby boomers & gen-x will struggle to dump mail...I mean it simple

> and just works.
>
> Indeed.
>
> There's also the fact that it comes to you as opposed to you going to it.
>
> > We were trying to get a community of newbie techies mostly millennials &
> > gen-z to actively engage on a list we subscribed them too for the past 2
> > years and believe me, I can count no more than 10 posts mainly from we
> > few mailing list folk...
> >
> > When we requested for feedback, them gen-z cried out loud for
> > interactions to happen on some social media app through groups or
> > channels, and since they are the target audience and the majority, we
> > settled for discord and telegram which they actively engage on :-).
>
> I must be ignorant as I don't grok this.
>
> Are they willing to use a (traditional) forum (of sorts) that is
> dedicated to the venue?  Or Are they wanting things to come to them
> wherever they happen to be today?  E.g. Facebook group, Discord, Slack,
> etc?
>
> If it's the former, okay, that's a web UI / UX as opposed to mail UI / UX.
>
> If it's the latter, does that mean that you have to constantly keep
> changing /where/ messages are sent to in order to keep up with the
> latest and greatest or at least most popular (in your audience) flavor
> of the day / week / month / year social media site?
>
> Either way, does the target audience that you're talking about actively
> go to said site(s) (I want to say watering hole) and poll them?
>
> Or are they using some phone / device app that polls them and puts a
> notification over the icon?
>
> I'm asking from a place of ignorance as I really don't understand this
> mentality.
>
> Part of my struggle is that I fail to see how it scales to poll multiple
> sites (or app icon notifications) when there are 10s, 100s, or even more
> things to check.  This is /exactly/ one of the reasons that I *strongly*
> /prefer/ email, it comes to me and gets filed in the proper folders.
> Where messages sit waiting to be read with the folder indicating that
> there are unread messages in it.  I then go read them when it's
> convenient for me to do so.  But most importantly, I don't have to go
> check multiple -> many places.  The unread notification / count
> percolates up to one single location.
>
> Any additional insight that you can provide would be appreciated.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>
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