[discussion] archiving and retiring the Dot

[Paul Brown]

On Tuesday, 3 October 2023 20:30:51 CEST Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El dimarts, 3 d’octubre de 2023, a les 19:18:37 (CEST), Paul Brown va
> 
> escriure:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > > That is not correct, Akademy makes a huge use of the dot for sharing
> > > info
> > > to the wider community
> > > 
> > > You can see this by looking at the articles on https://dot.kde.org/
> > 
> > But that reasoning is a bit weird, no? I am reading "There are many
> > Akademy
> > articles on the dot because Akademy articles are posted on the dot". But
> > surely the same could be said of another site, say akademy.kde.org, if we
> > started posting Akademy articles there, right?
> > 
> > I don't see how that makes using the dot over any other site better.
> > 
> > > KDE needs somewhere for official news, having that just mixed in with
> > > blog
> > > posts would make them much harder to find and be drowned out in noise
> > 
> > I would argue that it is not noise. Blog posts  collected on the planet,
> > by
> > and large _are_ KDE news.
> > 
> > If anything the dot brings more noise to the planet than any other source,
> > as multiple largely unrelated  topics are covered on the dot, while blogs
> > of the different projects and developers tend to focus on narrow, specific
> > topics.
> > 
> > In any case, if noise is what you want to avoid (and it is a valid point
> > to
> > bring up), it makes much more sense to publish Akademy news on the site
> > that hosts all the other Akademy info, that is: on akademy.kde.org and
> > interested parties can go there to get their news.
> 
> I disagree, I see akademy.kde.org as the page for people explicitly
> interested in Akademy, but even people not really interested in Akademy are
> potentially interested in what happened in it,

As far as I know, there is no plan to stop posting news about Akademy or 
impede those people who are interested in Akademy news from reading them, 
albeit elsewhere.

> e.g. because they are
> interested in the decision we took to rename Plasma to Quark.

What?!?

> 
> > The same goes for KDE e.v. announcements (new sponsors, Board sprints,
> > advisory board meetings, etc.), and news and blog posts covering KDE's
> > mentorization programs: they should live on the sites that talk about
> > those
> > things so people who are only interested in those things can avoid all
> > other noise.
> > 
> > And if you want a wider array of news (i.e. something noisier), well, that
> > is what the planet is for.
> 
> I disagree, the planet is an assortment of blogs from contributors, not a
> news page.

¿Porqué no los dos? Of the 10 stories on the planet's front page, 7 are 
literally news stories directly related to KDE. I think you will find that 
those kind of numbers, 70% ~ 80% KDE-related news items,  are present 
throughout the planet.

That they are written by contributors does not not make them news stories.

> > By removing the dot from the equation, we are
> > helping readers reduce their exposure to noise.
> > 
> > It is also worth pointing out that the traffic to the dot is extremely low
> > and does not make up for the effort of writing for it and probably
> > maintaining it. While monthly visits to other sites are beyond the
> > thousands, sometimes the 10s of thousands, monthly visits to the dot are
> > in
> > the hundreds, rarely breaking 10 visitors a day.
> > 
> > I understand that not all projects equally popular, so there will be a a
> > wide differences in traffic,  but the dot is a news site. Maintaining a
> > news site nobody reads makes no sense.
> 
> Maybe nobody reads it because nothing is written into it. Last news item is
> from month ago, why would anyone visit a news page with so little news?

Or you can look at it from th other side: we slowed down publishing stuff on 
the dot because we found it an ineffective way of reaching the public. We have 
the general policy in the Promo team of not wasting the community's resources 
and money on things that have been proven to not work.

This may come as a shock, but some stuff that KDE has been doing for years in 
the area of communication and promotion actually does. not. work.

We found that publishing elsewhere reached larger audiences and produced more 
engagement and drove more  traffic to our other sites (which is the whole point) 
than posting to the dot. The added benefit was that we did not have t o waste 
hours dealing with the dot's awfully painful and crappy interface every time 
we wanted to post some news. Instead, we could get on with actual productive 
work. The decision was clear for us.

Most of the time, the dot is just in the way anyway. Or it is replicating 
information which is already elsewhere (and better and more complete, like in 
a release announcement), or not bringing anything in the way of traffic we 
cannot achieve better, much better, and much more of with social media.

You may not realise it now, but, by removing the dot, you are doing yourselves 
a favour. You will get more bang for your buck if we don't have to deal with 
it, and, from the communication/promotional perspective (the only one that 
counts for a news site) the dot is useless and its retirement well overdue.

Cheers

Paul
-- 
Promotion & Communication

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