[birken]

Wasn't most "legitimate discussion" already happening in private already? This article is pointing out situations where even in private people might not want to give out candid feedback, which seems like a different concern that what you are saying.

I'm a pretty active person online and I genuinely do not understand your concern. If you want to say something controversial online, just do so anonymously like you are doing now. If you want to give somebody candid advice I'm not sure why you'd do that in public anyways.

[skjfdoslifjeifj]

My apologies, I should have made clear that my post wasn't directed at the article.

> Wasn't most "legitimate discussion" already happening in private already?

Probably, but I think there was still much more interesting discussion going on publicly in years past. It's anecdotal but I've definitely seen a huge spike in how many of my colleagues are retreating entirely to private communities and most of them never make public comments anymore. That's disappointing to me because I think there's a lot of value in having these discussions in the open with respected and accomplished names attached. It also gives a level of perceived accessibility that I think is important.

[kenjackson]

“but I think there was still much more interesting discussion going on publicly in years past.”

Really? Prior to anonymous Internet comments there were even fewer discussions. I think recent years is when we’ve finally began to understand how people really feel.

[skjfdoslifjeifj]

You are correct. I should have limited my statement to discussions between people using their real identities. I also think this is subjective depending on how much value you place on being able to identify the participants. For example, in language related discussions I think it's extremely valuable to have people like SPJ, Anders Hejlsberg, Andrei Alexandrescu etc. as active AND identifiable participants. When I was in high school, during the very early days of Slashdot, quite a few highly respected developers, professors and authors would comment regularly under their own names. Reading their comments and having discussions with them definitely changed my life and I think it would be sad to see all these discussions move into private spaces or under anonymity due to fear of the mob.

[kenjackson]

I don’t think they fear the mob. They fear wasting their time. Where there are quality discussions you will still see lively discussions. Math is an area where top experts will still discuss online. It’s because they are less likely to be inundated with clowns.

Pop culture and politics is where the mob culture resides.

[skjfdoslifjeifj]

> I don't think they fear the mob.

I vehemently disagree. In my experience, a very substantial number of them fear the mob because there's so much at stake and nobody is interested in falling on their sword. Many people want to talk politics and philosophy and those subjects are often hard to avoid unless conversation is heavily restricted. I've had tons of conversations about algorithms that naturally turn into discussions of political and philosophical ramifications. A substantial amount of the screening that goes into accessing private communities revolves directly around likelihood of charitable interpretation, secrecy and behaviour on public social networks.

[kenjackson]

I disagree. In fact I spent some time looking online and I think there are more technical discussion I've ever seen online. There is more open source code then ever before and most of that discussion happens in the open. Many of the biggest contributors have these discussions online. I simply haven't seen the discussions disappear from public view as you seem to. Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough to find them?

[anonymousDan]

Can you give an example of what you mean by 'private communities'? Are they online? Can you give an example?

[bombcar]

Most forums have private boards or even private discords etc that you’d never know about until invited. (And if you do know about them they’re not the private ones, just the restricted ones - many layers like onions.)

[skjfdoslifjeifj]

I can't link either of the two I use here for obvious reasons, but the primary one I frequent is just a private website made by a bunch of Googlers. It's basically just an invite only forum with a more complicated trust/permission system. It's very active with roughly 5,000 users and access to boards is limited by a trust system which operates similarly to private torrent trackers.

The second one, which I only use occasionally, is a private Android/iOS app that is very similar to Signal group chats.

I've heard of quite a few others but I don't have first hand experience with them.