Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@dasrecht@chaos.social If you're sufficiently invested in this problem to try and solve it, I think a good place to start would be to simply reach out to some prolific contributors on Google Maps, and ask them (non-judgmentally, and without asking them to do anything) what is motivating them to do this 🙂

And try to understand their motivations and what draws them to it in as much detail as possible, crucially *without* trying to convince them to "come over to OSM". That should provide a wealth of information as to what's missing, though be prepared for the first answer not being the 'real' answer but rather a simplification. The nuance is important.

@dasrecht@chaos.social I guess more succinctly (and also somewhat ungenerously) this could be phrased as: do we want to find more ways to blame users, or do we want efficient solutions to the problem?

@dasrecht@chaos.social I think that's the easy answer out, to be honest - in a very literal sense, sure, extra steps make it less likely that someone engages with something. But even if somehow it is the sole *cause* (and it likely isn't), that doesn't mean that it's also the way towards solving it!

Once, Google was obscure too. Once, nobody understood how to use Facebook. Everything that is popular today was once new to people, and required often multiple unfamiliar processes to engage with - and yet people did.

So why aren't they doing so with OSM? What can *we*, as "the open-source community" (insofar one exists), do to make it more accessible and easier or more interesting to get involved in? I think that's a more productive angle to consider than "what is 'wrong' with those people" (to paraphrase it ungenerously).

@dasrecht@chaos.social I felt the same, but it's also a very good prompt to ask ourselves "why aren't they already, what's missing?".

@Profpatsch (Sidenote, all of this is from a background of "for some people this is just how they talk and/or how they are expected to, in their role, and I don't want to assume dishonesty unless I actually see it" - it's not so much relevant if your general preference is to stay away from people who come across like that in general)

@Profpatsch IME that's unlikely to be the case when there's a concrete commitment. Like, nothing is impossible, but usually the way that this sort of thing works is that someone makes a pseudo-commitment as a PR move, without the intention of ever doing what it implies, and then later tries to retroactively justify it (to others *and* to themselves, ethically) by saying "well what we're doing still technically fits in the description" even though it's not what anybody meant.

That's why I asked for very concrete commitments here, that are difficult to weasel out of; if they unambiguously say yes to that, it's unlikely they are looking to weasel out of it, because then they would've given a much more evasive answer. And with the concrete commitment, if they change their mind, they would have to openly admit to not following their promises in a way that can't really be justified.

TL;DR if someone clearly promises something, you can hold them to it, and that in and of itself discourages changes without a very good reason.

@Profpatsch I mean, it's definitely corpo-speak, but for me personally what matters is whether someone is open to making concrete commitments - usually the answer is "no", but I was pleasantly surprised in this case :)

@silvermoon82 I vividly remember asking "how can I tell when it's too low?" like a year ago, and the doctor responding "don't worry, that's really unlikely to happen"

@luis_in_brief This... reminds me entirely too much of the Freenode debacle. At least here people found out *before* the domain was unknowingly sold to an unscrupulous third party, I suppose?

(If it's anything like the Freenode situation, people *are* going to buy into this narrative and claim that "whoever owns the domain owns the community and gets to do what they want with it")

@thattommyhall Zapping them definitely is a way of "coming for them" 🙃