It seems like I have a no-win situation. No matter what I post here, the engagement is either nonexistent, pointless or not very positive.
High ambitions: There are threads where I try to suggest some theoretical Julia advantage on certain things—usually negative response. Goes nowhere. Medium ambitions: These are threads where I try to ask for help on certain things I found within my reach—usually no response. No concrete help or advice makes them go anywhere unless it’s one of the times where I misevaluate the difficulty of such a feat to be too easy, in which case it turns into a negative response similar to those of high ambition. Low ambitions: These are usually Julia gimmicks, some tricks hard to do in other languages easy to do here, such as dynamically compiling code at will or auto-differentiating through weird stuff. There are some responses and sometimes positive ones, and they kinda show the strength of Julia, but sometimes they’re gimmicks and that’s it. Picking random stuff that’s hard to do in other languages but easy to do in Julia and showing how they can be done is like a solution looking for problems. Again, they don’t go anywhere.
Then there are some threads where I seek to probe the difficulty of certain things, have some theoretical discussions, etc, these are some miscellaneous stuff.
There was my attempt at making a package: Turns out so awful even I myself don’t want to use it, but well, exposes some Julia shenanigans.
I’m disappointed. It seems whatever I do, it doesn’t go anywhere.
I mean no disrespect, but most of your posts seem to boil down to “I have an idea, who’s going to do it for me?”
I think most of the people around here are either active developers spending time on Julia language / packages, or academics with their own specific research interests and needs. If you want something to happen, you need to be the main driving force. Don’t be afraid of getting your hands dirty with the actual coding.
Could you point me to posts by other users that you feel are similar to you attempts but receive the engagement you’re looking for?
I have seen people publish implementations of big ideas. I’ve seen people request comment on an issue where they’ve carefully considered multiple approaches to a problem. But I can’t really think of any open ended musings about something that could be cool.
If this were a white boarding session for a team or a dinner with friends then dreaming big can be fun, but it doesn’t really work in an open forum.
A forum post is an open invitation to random people with vastly different experiences and priorities to participate in a discussion you personally decided was worth having. Even without considering the open-endedness or ambition in your content, high engagement was already very unlikely. For a rough comparison, your last 8 topics had 25 responses and 1065 views (these statistics are visible in activity pages), while my last 8 topics had 24 responses and 1065 views. If we don’t just consider very recent topics, my account-wise engagement numbers are far worse than yours; for one statistic, I only ever had 1 topic exceed 100 cumulative likes, while you have at least 6.
In my opinion, other people’s suggestions may have other benefits, but they won’t accomplish your demand for more active and positive engagement, and to be fair they may not necessarily have been intended to. The only way to encourage a group of people to give regular attention and quality effort to your ideas is to pay them living wages, and it’d still be unreasonable to expect that they will always have usable advice and never make mistakes for whatever you decided to start talking about (they say 90% of tech startups fail for good reason). Many of my topics with significant engagement failed to reach a satisfying resolution, which I often stumble onto elsewhere by chance, and I’ve gotten incorrect or ambiguous information that happened to be caught and corrected elsewhere. For strangers sharing ideas, especially without pay, unsatisfying outcomes are just par for the course.
Note, those likes are also the likes received by the commenters in the thread. In the case of OP’s threads, the overwhelming majority of those likes are going towards people trying very hardly to politely tell them that
the “idea” he’s proclaiming isn’t valued
he’s posting an awful lot of repetitive and annoying threads
Frankly, I think at some point, trying to sugarcoat this isn’t helping anyone. The OP isn’t getting positive engagment because the posts they keep putting up are not wanted, and they refuse to listen to the people explaining it.
Respectfully, despite the element of truth there, that criticism has proven to be unconstructive and opinionated to the point of being misleading. This post is just a culmination of countless isolated suggestions to bring topics back down to earth not panning out, and why should they have? Should we expect everyone to know when their ideas are repetitive or unvalued, or even agree on whether they are? That’s why I think it’s worth emphasizing that the issue is a simpler, excessive expectation from a forum: 1) the levels of engagement were actually typical and greater than at least one other regular, and 2) random strangers are simply not invested or overall qualified enough to frequently give us the advice or validation we’d like to have in a timely manner. That will remain true no matter how good we get at writing topics, that’s just the nature of social media.
Back down to earth what? That could be correct if I got positive engagement from some of the more doable stuff. But then again, not a really positive engagement there. With actual code? I’ve had some good ones, but are you sure code gimmicks are what you want? I guess not either.
If I were posting on this forum as some sort of engagement farm, my posts would’ve been some of the unintentionally most successful, but this is not what I’m aiming for, and not what the Julia discourse has been aiming for since a very long time, so I aimed for positive ideas instead, except it’s not working. And I’m not sure what repetitive means to be fair. My ideas are normally drawn from an infinite pool of ideas. Why would I even have repetitive ideas posted? The ideas always change.
I’m very sorry your topics here haven’t worked out like you had hoped. I’m still not sure what you were hoping for, but I don’t think this topic is likely to provide it either.