On Fri, Aug 18, 2023, at 16:59, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Are we going to tackle this mess? I am going to suggest that the only rational response here is to say “no”. There are many factors at play here, most of them not being technical in nature. Fundamentally, this is a matter of discipline in communications, something that tooling is not well suited to help with. It is a human problem. Even if you thought that technical changes were a reasonable angle of attack, that would require reaching into a diverse collection of MUAs. There aren’t that many left, but it is still a diverse enough market to make that tricky at best. As a community, we could continue to hold the line in various ways. We could stick to silly and tiny message size limits, treat top posters as pariahs, and other employ equally ineffectual but exclusionary tactics to “encourage” compliance and homogeneity. The result being further marginalising contributions from new people and setbacks on efforts to improve diversity. So, rather than try to fix this in whatever way, I suggest we instead do more to embrace it. Lift size limits. Tolerate HTML mail, top posts, waste, poor English. That comes with a cost (all of what you described and likely more), but the cost of the alternative is worse. This is probably another of those “worse is better” scenarios.
