Orgdown - the Interesting Feedback Phase so Far

At EmacsConf21, I announced a new standard for a lightweight markup language: Orgdown. I wrote about it in this article. You should have read it or watched the video in order to be able to understand this here.

Since the go-live, there has been some "interesting" development and I had some learning effects on community dynamics. In this article, I want to summarize my findings and provide some insight that reflects my personal situation now.

My main worries before the go-live were:

• The community may think I want to take away something from GNU/Emacs.
• People may think that there will be an incompatible markup similar to the Markdown situation.
• People might assume that third-party tools need to implement everything that Org-mode provides.
  • Therefore, I developed the concept of Orgdown levels.

There were two possible generic approaches for me: start from zero with an open process, involving peers in all choices such as naming, Orgdown1 syntax elements, ...

While this approach offers maximum community involvement, my fear was to get into too many long discussions about details before I could express my vision to anybody in a concise way, extending some discussions I had after my Org-mode as a markup article which led me to the idea that we do need something like Orgdown. Some people do have difficulties in understanding the purpose of a lightweight markup language in contrast to a tool like GNU/Emacs Org-mode.

The second approach would have been: defining everything myself up to, e.g., Orgdown7 and publish with a big bang. The downsides here are obvious.

So I chose an in-between approach which I thought would be a clever way of getting the project up and running fast and allowing for a community discussion on large parts of the idea: defining only a minimal set (name, common structure/idea/documentation, syntax elements for only Orgdown1, providing a collaborative home on GitLab) and hope for a project community that will take over (or at least support) from there, discussing syntax elements for Orgdown2 and taking the project to its next logical steps.

From having the idea of Orgdown in summer 2021 to end of November, I spent a fair share of my spare time designing the idea, throwing away ideas, generating new ideas, looking for similar projects, finding a way of letting peers contribute with a low entry barrier while keeping the core as small as possible.

However, I did think that I would need to stay independent from the Org-mode website, not referring to it on purpose in order not to irritate or scare potential users of the syntax. I even wrote a tutorial for Orgdown for that reason.

With having a focus on people who are not familiar with Org-mode, I also wanted to welcome the Org-mode community whose help is necessary in order to get a working project here.

This way, I had to find the sweet spot in many areas in order to get a balanced and small site that is able to satisfy both user groups I had in mind. Trust me, this sound easier as it is when you're working out the details.

With each step forward, my curiosity grew how the project will be received by the Org-mode community. I tried to think of all the misconceptions that may arise and also tried to prevent them as much as I can.

During my work, I've seen a couple of discussions where Orgdown would have been the perfect contribution but I had to stay quiet until it's ready. I wanted to give Orgdown to the Org-mode community as a present. A gift which I would like to see embraced as a small contribution that improves the Org-mode ecosystem at its borders to other user groups.

I got enthusiastic.

Even though my EmacsConf21 talk was pre-recorded, I was very nervous. During the event, I published the motivation article, my own copy of the video and the project webpage. I felt almost like as a child before Christmas eve when we do get the presents here in Austria.

On Sunday, I wrote an article for the Org-mode mailinglist. I also published the same text on Emacs reddit.

I sent pre-texted Mastodon toots that get cross-posed to Twitter.

So much about marketing for the initial go-live for me.

At the EmacsConf21, IRC feedback was very good with no single exception. I was prepared for negative feedback a bit, mainly because of the potential misunderstanding that I do want to take something away from the community.

With the positive feedback, my nervousness was transformed into an enthusiastic wave of joy which was quite deceitful from a later perspective.

The Org-mode mailinglist (Sunday evening and later) had mixed feedback for me. People who did express their negative opinion referred to the choice of the name only. The idea was generally received as something positive and most people do seem to have understood the aim of the project. As always, the tone of voice was good and some sub-discussions were even about the idea and not the name.

The reddit posting was a different thing altogether. The feedback was bad to very bad with only a few positive bits here or there. There was no discussion on the idea at all, just the topic on the choice of the name. When I got heated and wrote that I'd probably prefer to take the project offline, somebody wrote:

That would be preferable to going forward with a horrible name. If this type of negativity is a problem, I strongly discourage you from working on any open source project, because the only way to avoid mildly negative comments like you've gotten here is to not do anything.

I might be lighthearted but that hit me more that it should - mildly or not. I had to go for a walk outside to collect my thoughts.

A "horrible name"? Really? Yes, I can think of alternative names, some proposals were even better than "Orgdown" also from my personal view. But "horrible"?

Whatever.

Feedback on my Mastodon toots was positive with no exception. I even received very encouraging toots after I expressed my irritations about the name discussion also from people who dislike the name as well. I really do like the Mastodon community.

On Twitter, there was only few feedback - as always. Although I've got more Twitter followers compared to followers on Mastodon, interaction does seem to be more intense on Mastodon. (Maybe I quit Twitter when my Mastodon followers exceed my Twitter followers?)

Two people on Twitter expressed similar experiences with different toxic FOSS communities which scared them away for good. This is not a good sign. For no FOSS community.

I don't want to give the impression that my actions were flawless. After all, I'm learning how to do things like that while doing things like that. I've never started something like this before and I don't think that you can easily find working concepts on the web. So here are some things where I failed in delivering a better experience to interested parties.

The obvious one is that I underestimated the importance of the name. While I do care about a good name, it was not something where I've spent too much time on. When I thought about "Orgdown", I did think that this is a very good choice. It reminds people of Markdown, which was an intentional choice. To me, the competition for Orgdown is Markdown as the dominant lightweight markup on the web. Normal users might get a clue that Orgdown is similar to Markdown because of that. This could be a door-opener via recognition so that the rest of Orgdown can be explained easily. To me, it never occurred that this similarity might be interpreted as a very bad thing. So I did not spent further time on the name. After all, I was certain that the idea is much more important than the name, as far as it is not a "horrible" one.

Another error was that I may have been too ambitious to start with the discussion I was waiting for. For example:

• on the syntax candidates for Orgdown2,
• completing the tool-support database,
• encouraging peers to contribute,
• if we need to have an Orgdown level that tries to map the syntax elements of Markdown as closely as possible,
• discuss whether we should aim for Orgdown file validators or validation concepts for tools (I tend to the latter),
• looking for the most promising candidate for a formal (BNF) definition,
• adapting parsers for Orgdown,
• dream of an inter-connected web of Orgdown files as I have tasered with the gemini project,
• and so forth.

You can see why I was irritated on this stupid name thing when I already had those discussions in mind instead.

After I did the hard work on the "framework" of the idea, the first nucleus on the project, I could not wait to see the baby growing, taking over the markup world, connecting the GNU/Emacs community with more and more third-party text-based tools. That was a bit naïve.

My initial reactions on the name discussion were unfortunate because I tried to convince people that the name "is good enough" and that the rest of the project is more important than its name. I should have taken this more serious as it has the power to kill the whole thing right at its start.

I did not want to re-start everything with a new name because I've invested much effort in creating the content that is there. Switching to a different name would reset the project right to its start again, losing the go-live effect of previous weekend, its URL that is now out there, the motivation video which aims to explain the situation to users of Emacs, the EmacsConf21 talk publicity, and it would require much effort to reach the status where Orgdown is now.

In hindsight, the decision on getting the minimal Orgdown project online myself was wrong. There is no shortcut where you can expect your minimal nucleus be a common ground to start from.

Quite frankly, I may not have the energy to throw away everything and start from zero with a different name. Especially when I still do think that "Orgdown" is really not that bad.

Some people do not seem to realize what it took to get there - which is partly understandingly because I had to learn by doing what it takes to get the idea into a coherent and consistent form.

Simply switching to a different name is not just search&replace. It would reset the project almost to its very start again as explained above.

I always wondered why people who are the center of a shitstorm do take the situation so serious. I just thought that avoiding the web for a couple of hours/days can solve most shitstorms without much harm to their victims.

I'm not used to that rudeness. At least that level of rudeness for a relatively minor thing like the name of the Orgdown project.

Now that I have experienced a very mild form of a shitstorm in context of Orgdown, I have changed my mind. When this incident does have that much impact on me, how bad is a real shitstorm?

I would like to thank to the many people who were so kind to send me their calming words even though they disliked the name in the first place as well. Most of them wrote that while the name choice might not be perfect, the rest of the idea is so much more important that we should stick to the name and go on. I am not sure if this is possible any more.

Throughout the emotional journey from the awesome reactions at EmacsConf21 to the catastrophic reddit comments, I wrote several comments that gave mixed signals in hindsight. As mentioned earlier, I initially thought that the name issue can be settled by explaining my motivation, emphasizing a bit the fact that the main target group is actually the people who don't know Org-mode and might use or explore Markdown instead.

Thinking that many people just do not realize that choosing a different name is much more than a simple search and replace task, my comments got a bit harsh when I wrote things like "if it is not Orgdown, there won't be anything else from my perspective. At least for now, at least from me." or "I do not want to throw away everything and start from scratch any more.".

I don't want to delete my old comments just for the sake of removing those mixed signals.

I don't have decided what to do next.

Bastien also gave good advice which includes a fresh start. I can't select just another name myself because meanwhile, I do think that whatever name I choose, there will be people who think that another name would have been better. I don't see the "this name might be good enough" movement as a consensus I was hoping for.

Therefore, there needs to be a public process that takes the responsibility. Meanwhile, I really don't care about the name as long as certain basic requirements are fulfilled:

1. Clearly different from anything else.
   • This is the main reason why I don't think that "Org" can be a good name although it would be the perfect candidate otherwise, I agree. But we've used "Org" for too many different things in too many documents already. Therefore, I'm skeptic that "Org" can do the trick any more without continuing the irritating conflict between implementation and syntax.
2. Easy to remember and type.
3. No insider joke the average non-Emacs user can understand.
4. Works well with the level indicator numbers I would like to keep.

Orgdown has the advantage of not being used for anything substantial before. I did my research and could not find any use of that term which would have caused overlap or Internet search problems.

So if I can convince myself to delete the Orgdown project in order to start from scratch, I do have to invest so much energy in things like:

• How to organize a public brainstorming process on names which does not involve me collecting ideas from too many places for a long period of time?
• How to conduct a public voting process on the naming candidates that were proposed?
• Should there be a different platform than GitLab which I'm familiar with from my projects from GitHub?
• Should there be a team of people already in this initial phase? How to find those people?
• How to prevent endless discussions for everything that needs to be decided?
• Should we discuss the syntax elements of Orgdown1?

All those questions can be answered, of course. At the same time, I know that it takes at least months to get to a status where Orgdown was on November 27th 2021 when it got published. I hate doing something twice when it was already done before.

Currently, my motivation is really poor for this process, despite some very nice encouraging comments from people.

At the one hand side, I could just ignore the naming discussion and continue with Orgdown as planned even when a larger group of people from the Emacs community is going to ignore or hate it. Maybe this is not important because the target group number one is not the Emacs community? Just asking that question could start the next flamewar I guess.

At the other hand, I could start the journey of this absolutely open fresh start approach and hope that not everything needs to be driven by me.

My personal backlog of blog articles to write, projects to do, PIM lecture content to improve up to writing my PIM book is quite large. Orgdown is important to me and to the Org-mode community - I'm totally convinced. However, it can't consume the majority of my spare time for the upcoming years. That's a price tag which I won't be willing to pay.

"The only winning move is not to play." And this would most probably be the end of Orgdown. Maybe I just forget Orgdown for a couple of weeks or months and do ask myself again if it is worth my energy? The lack of discussions about the idea did not let me hope that there are people who will take over that project as a community. Maybe it's only a small minority who really understands the positive impact of Orgdown - independent of its name - for the whole Org-mode ecosystem by providing new incentive for third-party software projects/services?

In any case, I now can say that I've made my point already. I do have something to throw in at discussions where I got the feeling that syntax and implementation got mixed up again. The stupid "I told you so" argument. Maybe this is as good as it gets for Orgdown?

Whatever, I've not decided yet and I don't know when I will. The glamour is somehow gone at the moment.