I am also somewhat worried some might disregard good ideas that come from accounts with the “beginner” label, but I also feel it might be harmful for the intended purpose of changing how others speak to you.
I’ve decided to keep my advanced label which I originally chose pretty much entirely for the joke I made above (in reality, I’m probably somewhere between “intermediate” and “advanced” depending on the topic, and I think I would otherwise err towards describing myself broadly as “intermediate”). If the idea is its an indicator of how you want others to speak to you, I don’t want other “advanced” users to hold back when talking to me, I’d rather deal with the consequences of lacking knowledge myself by pushing myself to learn more when I realize I’m not understanding something. I don’t want people to change their writing based on thinking I’m at some kind of lower level than them, and if I really need help I can use the ELI5 tag.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is it seems unnecessarily stratifying based on labels applied to users rather than context of the question or conversation. If others like this and disagree with my way of thinking about it, that’s fine, I don’t feel too strongly, but I do weakly think the ELI5 tag for posts is sufficient to accomplish the goal.
Haven’t read the entire thread by I find it meh for a few reasons:
forcing people to choose is not the right move I think, making it optional/suggested might be less of a forced hand and more fitting of an onboarding experience, less invasive
not sure what are the tools offered by Discourse but maybe having a BOT/tutorial upon creation where it potentially recommends you to give some context when you ask a question, saying that you might be new to the whole privacy thing
even worse and I kinda saw it coming. This means that we enforce something on both newcomers but also on existing users? As a new joiner, you need to put yourself into a box and if I want to reply to someone, I am now also supposed to be more cautious than usual? Unfair to delegate the burden on both ends if the Staff is not responsible for such “dedicated support”. If the Staff doesn’t want to do it (and I know you folks won’t have the bandwidth for it), why even putting this in place?
having basic softs skills or writing/asking the OP of a question itself, is just…enough? For existing users, it’s our responsibility to potentially not DROP a wall of text before asking that granularity that the OP wants sure, but it’s just more natural than skill-based tiers
Already happening quite naturally with some back and forth.
Also, I suspect that please-eli5 won’t be that used by newcomers because they might skip the rules whatsoever and rush into posting something.
On my side, it won’t change anything regarding the way I do interact with the people and I’ll continue fine-tuning their need for precisions/and how deep they want the details.
I think it just needs a tooltip or maybe a link to the outline of these dropdown options and what they control.
I also think we can all agree that gating all users from the forum until they make a choice (like what happened yesterday) was just bad UX. A better implementation would have been to default all newly created accounts to “beginner”. Also run a data migration yesterday to default all accounts younger than a week to “beginner” and everyone else to “intermediate”. ← something along those lines
Bruh, you’re kind. “Experts” have warned me that I am here spreading FUD.
I think the labels are the problem. It could really just say, L0, L1, L3, … without attaching words to it, which is I believe Jonah’s intention (explained here).
… because, in my eyes, anyone who anoints themself an “expert” is most certainly not one, like you suspect. I briefly touched upon about this once on some blog. Reproducing:
Privacy and security are very serious topics in our industry. The advances made in the recent years are nothing short of astonishing. Let’s Encrypt , who vend free TLS certificates, now power over 200 million websites. The TLS v1.3 standard drafted by E. Rescorla CTO at Mozilla, is 160+ pages long, took 4 years to draft, has contributions from industry experts from around the world, and is a document full of considerations for end-user’s privacy and security. On the other hand, engineers and cryptographers at Signal are pushing the envelope, going where any competent privacy and security conscious organization would aspire to go. Read this preview of just how they secure a user’s PIN: state-of-the-art and expensive but that didn’t deter them one bit (note: upcoming OPAQUE standard may be a cheaper way to accomplish a similar feat, curious reader). Despite stronger protections on Android, attacks that exfiltrate data are a reality and the world’s most vulnerable professionals are at most risk.
If the Meltdown and Spectre exploits are any indicator, the stakes are very high and it is easy to see why companies, even the ones that get a bad rap for privacy, go to extreme lengthsto secure their user’s data. The recent supply-chain exploits make it clear that the Information Security industry is no place for ego-building or showcasing fake mastery of forbidden arts. Very capable engineers, academics, cryptographers, and hackers have all had their fair share of fails in the face of scrutiny that their work invites. That’s the nature of the beast. The best among us, keep their heads down, and off to work they go month after month, year after year, to mitigate threats, and address exploits with utmost consideration, with their hubris, arrogance, and pride firmly tucked away. After all, by being cordial and humble is how the industry got here. If Dan Kaminsky were alive, he’d tell you this is how all of this is supposed to work. There is no competition here, just progress, hand-in-hand, and that’s all that matters.
As a new user, I found it jarring to have to answer this field to sign up. It’s hard to figure out where to draw the line between levels, especially when the space is so broad. I may be advanced in some areas but beginner in others. Not to mention that as a brand new user I have no idea much about this forum (does it prioritize privacy, security, autonomy, etc and how advanced are the usual topics) so it’s further hard to rank myself because I have no context really to what I’m ranking.
Feels like selecting intermediate is the only reasonable “default" option so why bother making it mandatory? I’ll admit I considered not finishing the sign up process out of spite. You know how we can be in the privacy space . It seems like unnecessary friction in front of creating an account.
This is my primary gripe with it. I’m very well equipped to answer some questions, but I’m out in the dark on others. The only people I consider advanced are those who are subject matter experts (SMEs) who are qualified to discuss hard technical details.
My understanding is that, that’s not the intention of this experience level feature. It would be very bold of anyone to label themselves as advanced/expert in all areas as there’s just too much stuff out there to know. I thought that the purpose is to let others know how you prefer to be replied to. Ex. skip the beginner background stuff and go straight to the technical points.
I thought only the beginner tag was shown? and intermediate/advanced are kept hidden.
Since this new system is exclusely meant for helping new people, I don’t understand why there are tiers for experience. Why isn’t it “beginner” just a toggle lol?
I think the reason why people were first against this was primarily because it was forcing us to choose a specific setting before we could interact with the forum. You had to choose at least one, which I guess creates an additional data point. And as a privacy forum, we all know how we feel about data points. Making this a toggle would be better IMO.
I like the idea of “just starting out” tag, and everything else is moot. We generally want to be more understanding of those who are starting their journey. As for intermediate and higher, they generally get the gist of what needs to be asked.
. It seems like unnecessary friction in front of creating an account.