# Thoughts from the Elm community on Intentional Communication

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/thoughts-from-the-elm-community-on-intentional-communication/99332
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [12 באוקטובר,‏ 2018,‏ 12:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/thoughts-from-the-elm-community-on-intentional-communication/99332 "2018-10-12T00:03:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
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### Author: ![evancz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/evancz/32/114000_2.png) [@evancz](https://meta.discourse.org/u/evancz)
#### Post date: [12 באוקטובר,‏ 2018,‏ 1:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/thoughts-from-the-elm-community-on-intentional-communication/99332/2 "2018-10-12T01:20:28Z")

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Thanks for sharing the talk here!

## Missing Stuff

In retrospect I wish I spent more time on these suggestions in spite of messing up the timing overall.

One important thing that I forgot to mention is about **moderation**. I am hopeful that labeling intent on each post could make moderation feel much less arbitrary. Rather than referring to a set of abstract rules, a moderator can base decisions on the actual stated intent of the poster. “The intent is **learn** but this post is doing X, Y, Z instead.” I don’t really know if that’ll make moderation _fully_ viable in practice, but it seems like it’d be at least _more_ viable.

The **Rate Limits** part shared above is based on experiences from our Discourse instance where we definitely have some posters that crowd out other perspectives with their speed and volume. The post length idea in **Draft Hints** in sort of relevant to that. Both of those apply to anything where the visual presentation is single-threaded though. We had the same issues with our mailing lists as well, but probably a bit more extreme. (Time limits is more for cases where people are already angry, and expectations is more about online places for work like GitHub.)

I think this stuff is all “cherry on top” kind of ideas though. To me, the root problem is about different people having different value systems (great!) and then creating systems where they collide via big blank boxes (risky!) Having communities define what “intents” are possible within their community is the best idea I have had there, partly because it can be a bridge between different norms. Rather than learning “that’s not what we do here” by posting 20 times and getting weird reactions, maybe the design of the forum communicates these values immediately by saying “which of these N things do you intend to do?”

## Motivation

I felt like designs for online discussion kind of got stuck between the engagement and freedom lineages, and I wanted to start talking about a third way. So my goal was not to talk good or bad about any particular _existing_ discussion forum, and I wasn’t imagining the audience being the folks who actually work on this stuff! (I hope it doesn’t feel aggressive or anything from this perspective!) Ultimately I just hope the ideas and references are interesting, and I am very keen to explore them in practice!

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